


Like a House on Fire

by More_of_This



Series: Don't Ask, Don't Tell [3]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, How Not To Start off your college carreer, How not do do Fire Safety, M/M, Nico and Leo are idiots, Nico is trying, Nico-centric, The Raccoon makes a reappearance, rated T for strong language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27152761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_of_This/pseuds/More_of_This
Summary: Nico had high hopes for university. Things were going to look up, this was where his life would really begin.Then he opened the door of his new dorm room only to find Leo Valdez. He figured he could do this. That was until the Raccoon Thing. At that point Nico seriously considered reporting his roommate.ORIn which Nico and Leo get off on the wrong foot but bond over the shared experience of being mostly accidental pyromaniacs. Until the raccoon. You really can't imagine how upset he is by the raccoon.
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Series: Don't Ask, Don't Tell [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1929433
Comments: 42
Kudos: 82





	1. No.

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's back? Back again! 
> 
> In this story we will explore Nico's freshman year in college, learn all about how he regrets his life choices and meet the raccoon up close and personal. 
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> (This picks up bits of the events in Burnt Plastic. I've written it in such a way that you won't miss any plot points but if you want to read Will's perspective on the events, I really encourage you to give it a read. Okay shameless self-promotion over, let's get to the story.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nico isn't having it but then something worse happens and all of a sudden the bad thing becomes his way out.   
> Yeah it didn't make any sense to him either. Welcome to uni.

He had to have the shittest luck in the world. 

No really, if there were a competition for “Bad Luck” or “The Universe Conspiring Against You” Nico wouldn’t just win gold. He’d create a whole new category for himself, a diamond class. There was nobody in the same league. There _couldn’t_ be anybody in the same league.

  
Because who else would go through the trouble of moving across a continent to outrun a rather horrifying high school experience only to open the door of their dorm on move-in day and come face to face with the fucker that had gotten them suspended in ninth grade for blowing up a science classroom. Which, for the record, he had not taken part in. At all. He was just standing too close. If anything he was the victim. 

Either way, Nico did the obvious thing: he stared, closed the door and walked straight back out without a word. This had to be a mistake.

“I’d like to ask for a new roommate,” he asked the first person that gave him the light of day at the reception desk in the administration building. He’d run practically the whole way there and panted slightly.

“No can do,” the girl replied impassively. She didn’t even look up from her clipboard. “Roommates are assigned randomly and you can’t change until the end of the first semester.”

He slammed his hands down on the desk and leaned forward. 

“That’s not possible, how is it random?” he said. And if he sounded even half as desperate as he was feeling it was a wonder that she hadn’t started laughing at him yet. “I got stuck with my chem partner from freshman year. How is that random?”  
She sighed and rolled her eyes. Nico was close enough to read the smiley sticker on her bright orange t-shirt. It said “Hello, my name is Clarisse.” She’d had the good taste to X out the eyes so at least it wasn’t so peppy that it’d make a normal person vomit.

“Well, coincidences happen,” Clarisse droned. She flipped over another page and shot him an annoyed look. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Coincidences-” Nico spluttered, and then, in a moment of glory yelled. “Lady I just moved here from _Los Angeles_!”

The glory dissipated quickly when heads turned his way and a mother rolled her eyes and tutted at him disapprovingly. Oh and, also, that was sarcasm. There was nothing glorious about being so desperately filled with anxiety that you start yelling at the girl behind the front desk. Actually he was pretty mortified. 

He’d expected her to start laughing, but that didn’t mean it was more fun when it happened. At least the hustle and bustle of students moving in was so hectic that most people didn’t even notice him causing a commotion.

“Oh my god,” Clarisse wheezed - she was actually hitting her hand against the wood. Nico didn’t know if he should be more or less insulted by that. “You have shitter luck than Percy Jackson oh my god. I never thought I’d see the day.”

Nico’s brain activity just kind of collapsed momentarily. Because there was no way. Not even his luck could be that bad. Right?

“Percy. Jackson,” he said, slowly. Stupidly. “Skater kid, brown hair, green eyes?” 

She regarded him like he’d just made the comedy show better. 

“Yeah, he’s captain of the swimming team, you know him?” 

By that point, Nico was ready for the ground to open up and swallow him. One way ticket straight to Tartarus. It couldn’t be worse than the ridiculous soap opera that his life was turning out to be. 

“I’m dropping out.”

Clarisse’s laughter followed him on his way out the front door. He had a feeling it would be haunting him in his nightmares for the coming four years or so. 

* * *

  
“So let me get this straight,” Jason said. 

Jason, who had met him in a coffee shop around the corner the moment he’d called because he was a bro like that. Nico sometimes wondered what he’d done to deserve a friend like him. Then of course he remembered the amount of fuckery he had to put up with on a day to day basis and it was suddenly crystal clear. He deserved good friends like Jason. The universe owed him at least that much.

“You’re rooming with Leo Valdez, from high school, who got you in trouble that one time, and then you continued to hate for the next three years even though you’ve never traded a single word outside of class.”

“I still have a burn scar don’t make it sound like I’m being unreasonable,” Nico grumbled into his mug. It was an actual mug, not a paper cup and Nico could appreciate that. It may still not be the most high class place in town but at least they had style. 

“And you can’t just request a new roommate?” Jason asked. 

He was mildly taken aback by how utterly reasonable that response was. 

“Aren’t you like, best buddies with him?” he asked him in return. Sue him for being a bit wary.  
Jason nodded. He stopped stirring, which Nico was thankful for because the sound of the spoon clinking against enamel was really grating after a while. 

“Which is exactly why I don’t want you to kill him.”

He pursed his lips at that, looking at the ceiling thoughtfully for a while. 

"Honestly that's fair." 

It wasn't like there was actually a chance he'd kill Leo Valdez on purpose. But Leo also hadn't set the science lab on fire on purpose and yet, here they all were. 

"Have you talked to him?" Jason asked, ever the voice of reason. He was clearly trying to come up with a way that would make all of this less awful for everybody. Nico commended him for his effort but honestly it was probably going to go horrifically wrong anyway. Today had showed him that apparently that was the kind of luck he had. 

"No," he admitted. Honesty was always the best policy with Jason Grace. "I walked in, saw him making his bed and walked out again."

Jason briefly looked like he literally couldn’t believe he’d done that but then he remembered who he was sitting across from and hummed. 

"Did you think that maybe that was a bit rude of you?"

Nico raised an eyebrow at him over the rim of his coffee cup. 

"Of course it was rude of me," he said. "I'm well aware that it was rude of me but truthfully my brain just short-cicuited and I needed to get out of there before I broke down in a useless pile of sobbing human."

Nico was aware of the dramatics he was royally layering on, yes, thank you for asking. But it wasn't entirely untruthful, he honestly could have cried a little. He sighed and slid down a little lower in his seat. Today was not going according to plan. And if that was a taste of how the rest of his year was going to turn out then he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

"It's just that I made such a big effort to get away from that hellhole, Jason," he said softly. Tinge of misery. You know, all the good stuff. "And then I open the door and it's just right there again, as if the universe is mocking me."

Jason reached over the table and put a hand on his shoulder; something that was not advised for anybody that was not Jason Grace. Or Reyna Avilla Ramirez Arellano. Nico hadn't bitten anybody in months but he wasn't above resorting to a little bit of violence if somebody broke his strict no-touching policy. 

"I know," Jason said. "But Leo isn't going to judge you, you know."

Forgive Nico for feeling a little bit skeptical about that. He shot Jason a pattented di Angelo look. 

"Oh come off it Nico, he's not," Jason insisted. "Leo's cool. A bit of an unguided missile on a permanent colision course, fair, but he won't judge you for," he made a small waving motion with his teaspoon. "You know."

"Jason that could really mean anything from my major to my fashion sense, to the fact that I like dick."

Jason, bless his soul, choked a little on his next sip of coffee. So it was the gay thing, huh.

"In all fairness, Nico, I don't think he'll give you any grief because he's been extremely scared of you ever since you yelled at him in Italian for two hours straight that one time in gym class when he missed your pass in volleyball. He's probably just as freaked out by this rooming assignment as you are."

Once again, for the people in the back: Nico was skeptical. It must've been written on his face because Jason shook his head and barked out a little laugh. 

"Seriously, Nico, you are pretty intimidating," he said. Nico felt something profound and soft was about to come next so he made a little retching sound and bent over the table for effect. 

"What are you doing?"

"Sorry," he said. "I'm deathly allergic to touchy-feely-bullshit. It makes my intestines crawl out of my throat."

He probably deserved the napkin Jason threw at his face. 

"I'm trying to be helpful and supportive over here but you're making it awfully difficult."

Nico shrugged. He probably would have made a very eloquent and witty remark to lighten the mood and steer it back to the problem at hand but at that point the door swung open and in walked his worst nightmare. 

He stiffened, his eyes went the size of the saucers under their fancy ceramic mugs. 

"Fucking shit," he cursed quietly under his breath. Before he even got the chance to properly deliberate if he should duck under the table to avoid being seen, he had to look in the exact direction Jason and him were sitting. Of course. Of fucking course.

"Jason!" Percy Jackson yelled enthusiastically, waving at them from the other side of the room. Nico questioned his life choices. Percy decided that it was a great idea to come say hi to his bro Jason Grace. He sank lower in his chair while Percy happily lumbered over. 

"How have you been, man," Percy said, clapping Jason on the shoulder good-naturedly. "How was San Francisco?"

He was like a golden retriever puppy. A slightly dumb golden retriever puppy. Nico hated this.

"It was fine," Jason said. "Warm. Nobody died at camp this year so I guess that's another win."

They grinned at each other and Nico hoped their rabid, obviously very platonic infatuation with each other was enough to keep Percy from noticing the other person at the table. 

Unfortunately yet predictably it was not. Percy had ADHD and the attention span of a fruit fly.

"So who's this, Jace, did you make a new-" Something in Percy’s face turned radiant when he noticed who he was looking at. "Oh my god, is that Nico?" 

"Yeah," Nico muttered, barely audible. He cleared his throat and put down his cup of coffee. "Yeah that would be Nico."

"Jesus Neeks it's been ages!" 

Nico winced at the nickname. It'd been ages since anybody had called him by it and to be fair he was alright with that. He hated it. He hated the fact that it reminded him so much of Percy. He hated the fact that he had been so damn infatuated with Percy Jackson back in high school and he especially hated what it still did to him right now. What Percy still did to him right now, it appeared. 

His heart rate sped up like he was running for his life, which sounded really tempting right about now. But that would be rude and Bianca would probably scold him half to death if he did that. Bianca for some god forsaken reason really liked Percy Jackson. 

"Hey, Percy," he said. He even added in a small and awkward wave for good measure. "It's been a while."

He didn't really know what else to say. Smile awkwardly it was then. He sat up a little straighter in his chair again and hid his trembling hands under his thighs, slumping over the table and looking into the milky brown of his coffee. Whatever Percy was, he wasn't all that great at reading non verbal communication cues because next thing Nico knew he'd pulled up a chair and joined them at their corner table.

"What have you been up to huh?" Percy asked him with a bright smile that Nico could not mirror. He tried though. It probably came out more as a grimace. 

"Ah, you know," he said. He awkwardly swung from side to side. "Being alive. Not dying. You know how it goes."

It had to be the stupidest quip he'd ever made but Percy didn't seem to think it terrible because he threw his head back and laughed. It was exactly the kind of laugh that made fourteen year old Nico's stomach swoop and knees go weak. Now it just gave him a wistful feeling and the realisation that he had been really moon-eyed over this man, holy freaking lord. 

"What brings you to New York?" Percy asked him. So Nico figured that, damn, he was now roped into a conversation.   
He freed one hand to pick up his coffee cup and shrugged. 

"Just wanted to get away from LA," he said. He took a slow, pensive sip of coffee. Mainly to avoid having to say anything for at least a second or two. "Something about leaving the nest, discovering new horizons-"

"Outrunning yourself and your horrifying parents," Jason added in with a mom look. Nico shot him the stink-eye. 

"Bianca's here too," Nico just said, completely ignoring the very valid point his friend had just thrown onto the table. If he didn't acknowledge them they didn't have to be true. "She's started an undecided major, so I don't know how that's going to end up."

Percy nodded and tilted his head to the side. "Huh."

Nico raised a brow at him. "Huh what, what are you trying to say with that?"

"Nothing really," Percy quickly said, flapping his hands like a demented seal. He was probably trying to be polite or apologetic.

"It's just that, well, I used to get along well with her when we were both in track team and I just never expected the two of you to stick together after high school. She seemed super eager to get away and do her own thing after graduation."

Nico shrugged. He understood what Percy was saying. In truth it was pretty weird that they'd ended up going to the same university in the end to literally everybody that had known them. 

"It's a twin thing," he joked. "We try to get away from each other but the universe won't let us." 

Translation: Nico would have shrugged and let her do whatever she wanted if it were up to him but his dad never would have let Nico move states by himself so she'd taken one for the team and applied to the same college he had. To at least give him a chance to get away from California. 

Honestly though, he suspected she just did it because she thought that they were never going to get in in the first place. Jokes on her, now she got to enjoy the freedoms of living a continent away from her parents as well. 

It wasn't like she'd really complained about it either. They weren't studying the same thing and both he and Bianca were content with the current arrangement. 

Or they had been, in theory, before Nico realised Percy Jackson went to the same school and he found out that Leo Valdez was to be his roommate. Those two things were unforeseen circumstances. And a bit of a bummer. 

Percy nodded. Evidently the explanation was good enough for him. Nico wasn't going to tell him that it was utterly ridiculous, he was fine with just getting out of the conversation as fast as possible.

"So you're at NYU now," Percy said with a grin. 

Nico graced him with a nod.

"Have you picked a major yet?"

Nico wondered if it would be worth it to outright lie to Percy and say that he didn't have a clue yet and that he was undecided like his sister. Because the truth of the matter was that his major was pretty lame. He was extremely interested in it, but it was pretty lame nonetheless. However there was the added factor of Jason Grace knowing what he was actually majoring in and him being a mom friend that glared across the table at him and warned him not to be a dick. 

"English and Italian literature," he thus admitted. 

Percy didn't find it lame, instead he whistled under his breath and told him that that sounded tough. Nico hated him for making him like him even more. He knew it was stupid but he felt pushed into a corner by his old ancient crush's sudden reappearance in his life. His first crush. The one he'd arguably never quite gotten over. He managed to outrun it well enough, but he wasn't really over Percy was he? God dammit. 

"Holy damn di Angelo you like to suffer, don't you?" 

He was sorely tempted to say something along the lines of 'yes, that's why I haven't bolted yet,' but once again he was sure that Jason would get in between him and the door with a sermon about manners and politeness. 

"I mean," he shrugged instead, slowly sipping his latte and hoping that he could think up an excuse to leave sooner rather than later. "I speak Italian at home and English with you guys so it'll probably be fine. I like reading, it's fine."

"Aren't you like... dyslexic?"

Nico choked on his latest mouthful of coffee and nearly spat it out all over the table. That comment threw him even worse than Percy's presence in the coffee shop to begin with. 

A little part of him threw a party and danced around his skull saying 'holy shit, Nico, Nico, oh my god he remembered. Did you hear that, he actually remembered!' He stomped that little part flat with a steel-tipped combat boot. _Shut up_ , he told the happy synapses. _It's literally how you met. Stop being gay, he has a girlfriend_.

"Yeah, so?" he grumbled, glaring. "That doesn't mean that I don't like to read."

Percy once again waved and spluttered. "No, no, I didn't mean anything by it, it was just a thought. Dyslexic kid studying literature, you have to admit it sounds self-destructive."

This explanation did nothing to improve Nico's mood. 

"Jackson," he warned him. Frankly he wasn't feeling like it was the time for well meaning friendly advice, especially not from this guy. 

"No, really Nico, I get it. Well, I don't get it," he struggled to get his thoughts out. "I wouldn't subject myself to that, it sounds pretty awful."

Nico looked at him with an expression that firmly told him that he was just digging his own grave deeper and deeper. 

"But Annabeth is the same, so I kind of know that it's a thing."

At the mention of Annabeth, Nico's stomach plunged and all the jittery feelings he'd had before evaporated. Right. He always seemed to forget about Annabeth Chase if she wasn't mentioned every five seconds. Good thing that Percy was so helpful in, you know, putting her in every conversation ever. 

"Oh right," he said. Jason made a sympathetic face at the other side of the table. Nico just stared back sourly. For some reason he just couldn't meet Percy's eyes anymore. 

"Listen," he said. "Say hi to Annabeth for me. It was-" he had to force himself pretty hard to get the next words out. They tasted like tar on his tongue. "Good seeing you again. But I've got to run. I haven't properly moved in yet, so I should get on that as soon as possible."

"Are you going to be okay?" Jason asked him. It seemed like an innocent enough question, just a friend asking another friend if he would be good with moving his stuff in. 

Nico tried for a grateful smile. 

"It'll be fine," he said. Then he promptly drained the rest of his cup and put it down on the table with a clap. "Everything is upstairs already anyway, I just need to unpack."

Jason nodded, patted him on the shoulder as he passed by and shot him an encouraging smile. He couldn't believe that settling in across the room from Leo Valdez was the lesser of two evils. This was not a good day. 

"He’s really changed a lot, hasn't he?" he dimly heard Percy ask Jason when he must've thought Nico was out of earshot. He ripped open the door with more force than necessary and stomped off into the autumn air. 

There was really no point in delaying his execution anymore.


	2. Okay, maybe this isn't so bad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nico suffers through the rest of his day while continually wishing it would just end already.

His stuff was still there in the hallway when he got back to his assigned dorm room. That was the positive thing. He really didn’t know what he would have done if somebody had stolen it or moved it but on the other hand his entire day had been a cosmic joke so it wasn’t like at least a part of him hadn’t sort of expected it. 

Leo was present in their dorm room as well, he noticed when he unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open. Nico wasn't sure if he should say fortunately or unfortunately. Both could be equally applicable. Fortunately because he at least knew now where he was. Unfortunately because it meant he was here. 

He stood in the doorway for a few moments, watching Leo scrolling through his phone on his bed. Then he realised that he was being creepy and he cleared his throat. 

"Hey," he said. Leo turned his head to the side to look at him. 

"'Sup."

Nico pulled a hand through his hair and sighed. A nervous habit. 

"Listen man, I'm sorry for earlier, I just-" he searched for the words to properly put his frantic panic reaction but came up blank. 

"Saw me, decided that it wasn't worth the pain, doubled back and asked to be reassigned to another room?" Leo helpfully filled in for him. He didn't look like it would make him feel all that bad. Actually he was grinning like a maniac. 

"Uh," said Nico. Smooth. Good with words, he was good with words. He was a lit major darn it. "Yeah, uh..." Dammit. 

"Don't worry about it di Angelo, it's exactly what I did when I had my stuff set up here as well."

The admission lifted a five ton concrete block of guilt off of Nico's shoulders. He properly stepped into the room and pushed his luggage into the corner next to the unoccupied bed. 

"Did you talk to Clarisse as well?" he asked. He might as well try to have a conversation or something. Wasn't that what you were supposed to do with new roommates? Get to know them? Granted, Nico had met Leo before and he hadn't been left with the most stellar impression. He wasn't kidding when he told Jason that he still had a burn scar from the good old lab explosion incident. 

Leo clicked off his phone to give him his full attention.

"Yeah, any idea why she started laughing at me when I explained the problem to her?" 

Nico pursed his lips. Honesty might be the best policy with Jason but it certainly wasn't with Leo, not in his books at least. Then again, Leo was one of Jason's best friends, so there was always the possibility that the words he said now would trickle through to him. Dammit.

He shrugged. 

"I can see how it can be funny to have two guys run up to you, requesting a new roommate because they know the person they've been assigned to from high school in Los Angeles," he said. 

It wasn't a lie. It wasn't the truth either but he didn't want to get into why Clarisse found it particularly funny that Nico passed by with his very particular request because then he might have to explain how Percy Jackson tied into all of it as well. 

Leo seemed to mull it over for 0.5 seconds before he shrugged and sat up on the edge of his bed.

"I guess," he said. 

They looked at each other for a while before Nico cleared his throat again. He could usually stand a fair bit of awkward tension but there was an amount of it present in the room that even he found ridiculous. 

"So I guess we're stuck with each other until-" he said, having kind of already forgotten what Clarisse had told him about switching roommates. Which may or may not have had something to do with running into people he would rather avoid. 

"December," Leo said. 

"December," Nico repeated. He chewed his lip in a terrible example of a nervous habit. 

"Actually probably January if you think about it, because first we have finals and then we have winter break," Leo added to the conversation. Nico wished he hadn't but he wasn't going to say that. 

"January," he just said, once again giving a very eloquent and worthwhile response.

He shook his head and mentally tried to tamp down his incredible awkwardness. He could do this. He was Nico di Angelo. He could take guys three times his size in a fight. Surely he could do some basic human interaction right? Right?

"So..." 

Oh yes Nico, mhm, that's it. That's how you have a conversation with people.

"I get it man, you didn't want to be rooming with me," Leo said. He held up his hands in a placating gesture. "I kind of feel the same way, not going to lie, you give me the freaky-deakies."

Nico just blinked at him. He was pretty sure that wasn't an actual word. 

"But the point is that we're both here now, there's nothing we can do about it for now, so you know we might as well just deal with it."

He nodded. Then he realised that he was still awkwardly standing in there and the door was still open so he closed it with a gentle click. He sat down on his bed with a sigh. 

"Yeah, I guess you're right," he said. He wondered what Jason would tell him to do in this situation if he were here.   
Probably something about talking through their feelings and then becoming best buds and skipping off into the sunset. Though somehow that last bit seemed a little bit unlikely.

"So Jason would probably tell me that we need to talk about things," he started and Leo stuck out his tongue and made a face. 

"Yeah, Jason is big on resolving feelings," Leo agreed.

"And I'm not," Nico said, just in case that that wasn't abundantly clear already. 

Leo looked at him like yeah, no kidding. He stood up and rummaged through the mess that was already forming on his desk. 

"Me neither, let's be honest.” 

Nico watched him pull a bunch of nuts and bolts from a pile that he started to fiddle with. 

"But we should probably go over some things that the other should know, you know, because we're living together whether we like it or not."

He hated to admit it but Leo made a valid point. Clarisse had made clear that there was no way they'd get their room assignments changed before the appropriate time next semester. Nico wasn't going to get away with an off-campus apartment, even though he had the funds readily available, in theory. And it would be a lie to say that he hadn’t at least considered it. It was just not a discussion he was willing to have with his father afterwards. There were very few rules about how he spent his money but he was sure that even his father would step on the brakes if he got himself a New York apartment out of nowhere.

So they were irrevocably saddled with each other's presence. They might as well lay down some basic ground rules. 

"I'll go first," Leo said, not waiting for him to give a response to the idea in the first place. He seemed pretty sure that he was onto something great and nothing was stopping him from pursuing this train of thought. Nico would have scoffed if it wasn't a very welcome turn in the conversation. 

"I have ADHD so I have the attention span of a goldfish. Sorry. If I'm concentrating hard on something I might also like... have a whole conversation I'm aware of and then forget about it entirely,” Leo said. Nico was unsurprisingly, unsurprised.   
He wanted to heave a sigh in relief too, though. This was familiar territory. He could do this. They were going to start small and easy and they were going to be okay with each. Or something. He didn't know, he was terrible people and he didn't know what he was doing.

"Yeah, same," he said, effectively cutting off the rabbit hole that was his own mind. "I tend to hyperfocus. I'm a lit major, so I'll probably be reading a lot. Don't expect me to know you're there."

In the instances he planned on actually putting himself through reading the whole thing from paper. Because he loved stories and he loved words and reading, but there was still the added difficulty of reading when he tried to read stuff.   
Which wasn't his forte, what with the letters swimming away from him and insisting to make things a lot harder than they needed to be. So he'd thought through his contingencies with Bianca before he shrugged and head over heels applied to the program like the dumbass he was. 

There were the obvious things like getting an e-reader with the option to reverse the colours of the screen, a strange yet effective method that worked for him well enough. And if all else failed, he had audio books. He could even listen to those on the way to and from class. Audio books were probably going to save his life and his degree. 

"Oh cool, that works out well, huh?" Leo grinned. Nico somehow found it in himself to smile back. He called that progress. 

"Sure does," he said. "I also kind of snore according to my sister."

He felt like mentioning it on the off-chance that it was true and Bianca hadn't been massively exaggerating when they shared a tent on their yearly camping trips in times long past. 

Leo shrugged. 

"No worries there, I sleep like a dead pig, Piper used a foghorn in senior year once and I barely woke up," he said. He fiddled with his nuts and bolts for a while, thinking of his next move. 

Nico could think of a lot of things that might need to be talked about but at the same time he didn't want to throw all of his metaphorical dirty laundry out in the open immediately. 

"I experiment a lot with things and sometimes that goes wrong and things catch fire," Leo finally came up with. Nico snorted. 

"Yeah I know," he said. That didn't need to be addressed further. "I'm kind of an insomniac. I'm also pretty touchy about other people touching me or moving any of my stuff. So just like," he made a cutting motion with his hand. Like a karate chop in the air. "Your part of the room is yours, my part of the room is mine. Cool?"

"Cool," Leo confirmed. "Yeah I don't know what to add more. I don't care if you touch my things but it's at your own risk. If something goes wrong and you need medical attention then that's on you."

Nico nodded. Later he would come to grieve that he hadn't objected to this clause in the roommate agreement more. But there and then he simply wasn't aware of how necessary it was to do so. So he didn't. 

"That covers everything doesn't it?" he said. He figured that the bare minimum was already met. And he needed to unpack so he wanted to get out of this conversation as soon as possible. 

"I guess," Leo said. Then he paused and looked at him with slight discomfort. And Nico wasn't sure if he wanted to know what was going to come next because things that made Leo Valdez uncomfortable were usually not good for his health.

“What about, you know?" Leo wiggled his brows suggestively. Nico just raised one of his own in response because he had no idea what his roommate was getting at. 

"Oh, you know," he said. "That uh, that college thing a lot of people do. Where they want to kick their roommate out. Because they need time to themselves."

"If I need time to myself I'll go to the library or something, I don't mean to hog the room?" it came out more like a question than a statement. He had no idea what Leo was on about. 

"No, not that, uh, you know, bringing other people over," Leo tried again. 

Nico stared blankly for a short while longer and then the pieces clicked and he broke down in a fit of laughter that was one hundred percent pure anguish, with a dash of awkward pain and not even a smidgeon of humour. 

"Oh my god, are you talking about hooking up?" he asked, though he was pretty sure that he'd inferred the meaning of that correctly considering the awful amount of awkward Leo had needed to wade through before he got to the actual point of his question. "Yeah, I don't think I'll be doing a lot of hooking up. Uh. I’m socially inept.”

And gay. And repressed. But that was something Leo definitely didn’t need to know, no matter what Jason said about the guy. 

He'd heard enough stories about people coming out in college and more openness towards different sexualities, true but he'd also heard that college was the perfect place to start over your life in the way you wanted to and look how that had turned out for him so far.

“Ah, come on di Angelo, handsome man like yourself? The ladies will be all over you. I hear dark, brooding and mysterious is attractive,” Leo said. Nico couldn’t really tell if he was joking or really trying to help. But also he didn’t want to know because either one of those was a pretty horrible option. 

“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “I really don’t think I’ll be hooking up with any girls this year. Or like ever. Like, quite sure. Like one hundred percent sure.”

Leo, for some unfathomable reason didn’t want to let it go at that. Two thoughts battled in Nico's head for dominance. The firs one was Kill me and the second This is a greatly exaggerated reaction considering the fact that we barely know each other.   
Kill me obviously won out. 

“Oh come on man, don’t be so down on yourself. You’re all dark and quiet and mysterious, ladies dig that,” Leo said, animatedly. 

“I’m really not,” he mumbled. “And I’m not hooking up with any random girls but in case I ever do I’ll text slash call you in advance like a good roommate. Now please let it go.”

“Oh,” Leo said. He looked back down at his fiddling hands. “Okay, cool. I won’t pry. Sorry.”

He pulled a rubber band out of his pocket and used it to snap his entire creation into place. It was a rather impressive miniature helicopter. Nico had to hand it to him, he was good with his hands. That was a fine helicopter and it had only taken Leo roughly two minutes to make it.

"This room is a no judging zone,” he then proudly proclaimed. “And I declare that from this moment forth we shall not judge whomever the other does or does not hook up with.”

Nico just quietly thought that he might come to choke on those words further down the line considering who he was talking to. He decided to wisely keep his mouth shut. 

“Except for Jason man, if you hook up with Jason, I’m going to judge you big time,” he tacked on and Nico choked on his spit. 

“Excuse me what?”

“Jason is a guy that deserves to be wooed and romanced, not wham bam slam the door in your face,” Leo said solemnly. “If you just hook up with him I’m going to judge you because he deserves better than that. You know he’s sensitive.”

Nico was too perplexed to say anything at first. He just stared at him with his mouth slightly open. 

At least he wasn’t a bigot. He’d take the small mercies where he could get them. 

So he just stuttered out a meek “duly noted” and looked at his luggage at which point he remembered he was sitting on a bare mattress surrounded by suitcases and he should really get on that sometime soon. Preferably before it turned dark or their RA came knocking for some kind of cheesy floor meeting. Something about getting along and reporting misconduct and everything. The works. Nico knew it was coming but that didn't mean he was looking forward to it. 

He managed to get his bedsheets sorted out at least by the time somebody knocked, so if things dragged on for too long he could just fall face first into his blankets. Leo opened the door. 

On the other side was a guy with a troublemaker grin and an orange shirt, just like the one Clarisse had been wearing at the front desk. He was also wearing the same smiley sticker. This guy’s hadn't been mutilated, but he hadn't quite used it the way it was supposed to either, because instead of being a friendly happy welcoming message saying "Hello, my name is name," the blank was filled with "Tired". 

So his sticker read Hello, my name is Tired. After the day he'd had Nico felt that sentiment in his soul. He was tired too, only not in the way that would be getting him any sleep tonight. Quite the opposite, even. There was a very real chance he'd just lie in bed all night, staring up at the ceiling planks. It was a nice ceiling though, better than the one he had at home. He’d miss the familiar cracks, however.

"Hi," the guy said. "I'm Travis. You're the lovers Clarisse told me about aren't you."

Nico glared at him. He joined Leo at the door. 

"If this is your idea of a joke then it's not fucking funny," he said. The guy, presumably their RA, held his clipboard up in surrender. At least he knew what was good for him.

"Don't mean anything by it pal, it was just a figure of speech," he said. Nico didn't stop glaring. He felt like he had the right to.

He'd been made fun of a little bit too much already in the past six hours or so. 

Travis cleared his throat.

"Anyway, floor meeting in the common room in ten minutes," he said. Nico nodded and went back to unpacking. Not that he was putting any effort into it, he just wanted to find his sweatpants so he could change out of jeans and settle down with his laptop and Good Omens later.

"Okay," Leo said for the both of them. 

"Try not to kill each other in the mean time," the RA said. How friendly and thoughtful. "That would give me a lot of extra paperwork." Or not.

* * *

  
There was really a special place in hell reserved for people who made grown adults toss a bouncy ball around and tell each other one "interesting" fact about themselves. 

In other words Nico felt like he'd fallen straight into hell for the nth time that day and he was ready to commit homicide. So far Travis Stoll was the highest contender for the price of getting viciously murdered. It even looked like he was having fun watching them all squirm with fake smiles. 

At least nobody had thrown him the ball for now. The other good kids seemed to find his glower off-putting enough to not want to know his name. 

Then of course Leo Valdez happened and he introduced himself with a grin and a flourish. 

"Hi," he said. "My name is Leo Valdez, I just started a civil engineering major and I have two cats named Buford and Festus. They can do tricks as well."

Several girls cooed. At least one of them, Piper, if Nico recalled correctly. Which of course he did, he knew Piper, he was just being a dick about it for Jason's sake. They'd dated a while in sophomore year of high school and long story short Jason had come out of it feeling dejected because it didn't work out. 

Nico would probably still like Piper if it weren't for principle but Nico would do a lot of things if it weren’t for principle so here they were. 

"Leo, you taught your cats to stand on their hind legs, that's one trick, and it isn't really that impressive," she said.  
Nico tried to hold in his laughter out of the aforementioned principle but failed.

"There are two cats and they can each do a trick, so two tricks, voilà, plural."

It earned him a few snickers. Nico hated to admit it, but at the moment it did look like a lot of ladies wanted a piece of Leo (long story) and he wasn't sure if he wanted to applaud that or you know, heave. Leo clearly didn't want to talk about it any more, though, because he bounced the ball Nico's way so violently that it ended up knocking him in the eye.

"Dude, what the hell!" 

He blinked a few times to make sure his contact lens was still in place and not somewhere on the floor. Or on the back of his eyeball. That would suck, he'd read a lot of horor stories about that on the internet back in the day. "Watch the eyes. Shit!"

That was certainly an introduction that put people off of finding him grumpy and unapproachable. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he could hear Bianca laughing at him. Maybe it was twin telepathy. Or maybe it was just knowing his sister well enough to be aware of the fact that she was definitely laughing at him in spirit every time he experienced any form of misfortune. 

Twenty pair of eyes were fixed on him expectantly. Some of them were more interested than others. The blond guy near the door, for instance, seemed to find the cracks in the ceiling much more riveting than him. Nico tried to feel bad about that but now he got a good look at the column of his throat and it was delicious so he would survive. 

"Oh, uh," he mumbled. The attention made him shrink a little deeper into his jacket. "I'm Nico di Angelo, I'm a foreign literature major and...." 

He scrambled for anything interesting about himself that wasn't excruciatingly awkward. He would have been sarcastic and told everybody that he had a tattoo on his ass, he even had it all planned out, but then stupid Leo with his stupid evil grin had to hit him in the eye with the stupid bouncy ball and now he was thrown off. The fact of the matter was that he had no quirky facts or cats that could do tricks. The only thing he could boast was a dysfunctional family, being Italian, which, duh, his name and lingering accent kind of gave away to anybody who had half a braincell and the fact that he had a tattoo. 

Obviously he went for the dysfunctional family there. 

"And I have a twin," he said. Curse him for thinking about Bianca at times like these.

"Oh my god!" somebody yelled excitedly from the other end of the circle. He looked so much like Travis that he could easily be his twin brother. "Can I ask you like a really weird question?" 

That was usually not a good start to any question. But Nico was nervous and uncomfortable and that usually made him a little stupid. So "Uh," he said. "Sure," he said. 

"Do you have the same size, you know," he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. "As your twin?" 

Okay, to Travis and this guy were definitely not twins, otherwise he would not have asked such a question.

Nico stared at him blankly for a few beats before he recovered to be his usual snarky self. At his side, Piper and Leo were already snickering.

"No," he said. "I can assure you that my dick is a lot bigger than my sister's."

The room exploded in laughter. Even the blond looked at him and his lips quirked. It was a nice smile, the kind that made his eyes sparkle and his nose scrunch up. Something about him looked like summer. Maybe it was the shade of his hair or the freckles. Nico didn't know. 

He did know that in a sudden burst of violent awkwardness he threw the ball down in the cute guy's direction. At least cute guy didn't catch it with his face and he was spared that embarrassment. But he was just about done with today. Sleep was starting to sound nice. Or a coma. 

"Okay so I'm Will Solace," the guy said and Nico could literally pinpoint this as the starting point of a ridiculous, four year long one-sided crush because who the hell was named Solace? That had to be the most literarily pleasing name in the universe. Solace and di Angelo. Solace of the angels. He could almost sigh dreamily at that. Cue the notebook squiggles that were surely to come now. 

"I'm a pre med nursing major and an interesting fact about me is that I’m secretly from Austin, Texas.”

"That's not a fun fact," the RA clone protested. "You can literally hear that you're from Texas."

"Excuse me you so cannot!" Solace responded, shooting himself in the foot by pronouncing every single vowel with a distinctive Southern lilt. He blinked a few times. "I see your point. In that case, I hold the current high score in Mario Cart on the common room Wii console."

Nico, all of a sudden, felt a lot less stupid about mentioning his twin sister. It wasn't the greatest and it paled in comparison to taming cats (note the sarcasm there, there was definitely some sarcasm going on) but at least he wasn't the resident geek now.   
He shuddered to think of how people would have perceived him if he had mentioned that he once placed fifth in the state championships for Mythomagic because yes those were a real thing. Even Leo didn't know that, and Leo had played with him during recess at one point. And been utterly destroyed by his ridiculously overpowered decks for playground plays. On the flip side, if they knew he had a card game obsession maybe he would be a less unapproachable. Not that he wanted to be particularly approachable. He'd just promised Hazel that he'd try to make some friends this year and he hated the idea of disappointing her. 

"This is true," Travis conceded when Will Solace looked his way for confirmation. "Anybody who can beat his high score on rainbow road this year gets a bottle of rum. And that is an official challenge, I'll put a paper up on the common room noticeboard so anybody who wants to battle for their honour can just write down their name and nickname to enter the official tournament."

They went on like that for a while, until everybody was thoroughly mortified and bored. Both and at the same time, in Nico's case. His eye had started to tear up halfway through Connor Stoll's intorduction and he was pretty sure he had a messed up contact lens that needed to be examined further. 

Travis suggested they continue getting to know each other and play some game like musical chairs with a manic glint in his eyes, but under loud protest gave in and decided that the voice of the people had spoken and went on to give the dullest information speach known to man. 

Or at least, it should have been, Travis did a surprising job of not making Nico want to tear his eyes out of their sockets. Mainly because he didn't seem to care.

He let everybody take a seat somewhere that wasn’t the floor and strolled over to the noticeboard at the front of the room. 

“So yeah,” he said. “I’m Travis Stoll, I will be your RA for this term. Now the school wants me to do some more floor bonding exercises but you won’t be fans of those and I want you all to like me so I won’t.”

A collective sigh of relief rippled through the room. 

“So I'm just going to go over the rules real quickly to make sure everybody is up to speed and we all understand each other."  
He looked across the room in a very responsible RA way. Sort of like a parent warning their kid not to stick their hand in the cookie jar. Except Travis looked like he was the kind of parent that looked at his kid that way and then said "Try me, bitch, see what happens." 

For some reason Nico was tempted to find out and see what would happen. Just to find out if this guy was for real. It wasn’t like he had a particular need to get in trouble. Trouble usually meant effort. 

Not that he had any problem with getting into trouble, somehow it seemed to be written all over him. ("Maybe it's the piercings and the monochrome wardrobe," Bianca had told him once. He'd told her to shut up, of course.) He just needed to blink and he could find himself in a less than ideal situation. Add to that the fact that he was socially inept and impulsive to boot, and you can imagine how he'd get his ass handed to him in high school from time to time. 

But the getting out of trouble usually needed a lot more energy than getting into it did. And if there was one thing he didn't want to do, it was putting in any shape or form of effort in university. Except of course for his classes, he could put effort in his classes, that was what he was here for. The other stuff, though, he'd vowed not to get caught up in. He had enough friends in Jason and Reyna, he didn't need to make any new ones and he didn't need to go to parties and live the whole college experience. 

All he wanted was four years of being left to his own devices and interesting books. He didn't think that was too much to ask, yet here he was and here Leo Valdez was and that was a feat. 

"Rules of conduct," Travis read from the page on his clipboard. "First of all, no pets in the dorm. That's a hard line. If you somehow smuggle one in, it's going to the shelter two blocks down and you're getting a write-up."

Nico snorted and dimly wondered who was dumb enough to smuggle pets into a university dorm building. 

Then again... he eyed the girls across the coffee table from him. Yeah, they'd get carried away in rescuing a puppy from oncoming traffic. 

"Blah blah, a lot of stuff about cleaning up common spaces and mutual respect," he droned on. "Really it's just basic stuff. Clean up after yourself, don't be a garbage person. I can't believe I still have to tell you this because you're all supposed to be adults but yeah, there we go."

Nico snorted. He might come to like Travis.

"Ooh, here's an important one," Travis went on, he waved his finger with a grin, kind of like he was trying to impersonate a stern teacher. Hint: he was failing at it quite miserably. But it was still well worth watching him try for the sheer comedic value.

"Don't set off the fire alarm in any situation that is not an actual emergency. Now, there's a smoke alarm in the kitchen, that goes off with every fart you make, so like try not to overcook your cup noodles or something."

Nico snorted at the use of that student stereotype. He honestly hoped that most people in the room could cook just a bit more than cup noodles.

"It's not connected to the main fire alarm but it will make an ungodly amount of noise and wake up everybody in the vicinity so like... yeah basically don't suck at cooking. But if there's an actual fire, hit the red button. Don't do that as a joke it's going to cost me an entire afternoon of paperwork if you do. And also you will get expelled, if not from the entire university then at least the dorms. Basically don't hit the fire alarm for funzies. Let's not have a repeat of autumn 2016, shall we?"

Leo nudged him in the ribs with an elbow so bony it should be considered a weapon.   
Nico shoved him with his shoulder to show exactly how annoying that was and how displeased he felt with the touching. Leo didn’t care. 

"What do you think happened last fall?"

"I don't care Leo, but from whatever he said, I'm going to infer that somebody set off the fire alarm,” he replied in a low whisper.

"Wow," Leo muttered. "Big brain time, huh?"

"Shut your face hole."

They were obviously the best of friends. Everybody that threw them the stink eye for being too annoyingly rowdy must surely have been thinking the same. 

Nico tuned out the rest of Travis's speech, instead choosing to stare blankly at a point slightly above his head on the wall. There were probably better things he could be doing right now. Like reading. He still had that book about the Greek demigod kid lying about. Maybe he should start on that. His sister had always been a rabid fan and since she told him that there was a lot of representation in them he had been won over to at least give it a try. 

Hazel had promised him he wouldn't regret it. Nico was still mildly doubtful considering the fact that there were a lot of weird tumblr communities worshipping ships or whatever and that wasn't his cup of tea per say. 

Or he could just be, you know, anywhere but here. He still needed to unpack. And he could really go for a smoke. Also on the other side of the room, Will Solace looked pretty attractive in a 'my parents are doctors and I am pre-med and also I am better than all of you and refuse to socialise with people who have tattoos or weirdly coloured hair' kind of way. Yeah, Nico didn't understand his own brain and what it was up to either sometimes. It was usually better not to put too much thought behind it. 

But he was cute. Even though he was wearing a button down vest over cutoff jeans and flip flops. In September. While it was fifty degrees outside. 

"Also don't forget that there will be school tours in March and April and that you should really behave. Make sure that the kids don't run away screaming, don't give the parents any lasting heart conditions. Just be warned about that. Annabeth likes to knock on doors so the prospective students can get a look at the dorm rooms from the inside so be warned about that,” he caught Travis saying. 

Nico made a face. That was going to be fun, not that he was going to remember it until March. He hoped somebody would put a notice up before that time. 

The end of Travis's speech came faster than he would have thought it would which was a blessing. It was a godawful ending, though. 

"So anyway, I expect you not to destroy things or kill each other. If you have any problems with your roommate then for the love of god figure things out yourself and if you're past the point of negotiating then I don't know, just knock on my door so I can point you to where Annabeth lives. She's the RA of floor six and she just loves being the conflict resolution person," he opened his arms and did jazz hands. 

"Voilà, that's the whole introduction speech. I do hope that you learned something from it and in particular I hope you learned that you're supposed to be an adult now and that means that you are expected to be able to solve your own damn problems. Don't forget that we have a movie night somewhere next week, somebody is sure to put an invitation up on the noticeboard with further information. Now scram, you have better things to do than being lectured about basic social and survival skills."

That, at least, Nico could agree with. 

He let out a deep sigh of relief when Travis threw up a peace sign, pointed out that he'd leave a school rulebook on the coffee table for those nerds that wanted to sift through it and then started to walk out. 

He was just about through the door when he seemed to remember something, turned on his heel and very sternly said.   
“Oh, and if you get caught hooking up in the hallway or the kitchen you owe everybody on this floor a drink to bleach out that image because that’s a dick move.”

Nico was now sure that he would get along with Travis. He seemed reasonable. Crazy, yes. But reasonable. 

"Can you believe that guy?" 

He turned his face to the right and found a girl there whose name he’d already forgotten. 

"Like, kudos for quitting the ball games when he did but man he could drone on."

She mimed sticking a finger down her throat for emphasis. 

Nico shrugged. "I thought it was short and sweet, really." 

He didn't quite know what to say. He hadn't gotten the best experience when voicing his opinions when he tried to practice back in high school. 

"Well, you were staring at the hot blond by the window the whole time, so I'm sure you did," she said, nodding calmly. She was mocking him, unsurprisingly. And Nico knew that he should probably make a bit of a fuss about that but for some reason he couldn't find it in himself to bitch at her because he was too busy trying to become one with the furniture. 

"I didn't-" he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "I wasn't-" his ears felt like they were a million degrees hot and he was sure his entire face was the colour of an overripe tomato. 

At least Leo had already moved away and was chatting with some girl called Nyssa who was also pursuing engineering. 

"Oh honey," the girl said. She tutted and shook her head. "It's okay. Your fragile masculinity can probably not take it yet but you're very into him. I can tell these things."

Nico squawked. 

“Excuse you, I don’t see how being gay makes me less masculine,” his mouth said before his brain caught up with it like an absolute traitor. 

She was mildly stunned for a split second and then started to laugh. Nico figured that by this point his day couldn't get any worse. 

"Oh I like you," she said. "I'm Drew in case you already forgot."

“I hadn’t,” Nico snapped. An outright lie. “Foreign literature major, I recall, my memory isn’t a sieve.”

“Then I guess we’ll see each other at introduction to romantic literature tomorrow, right?” she said. Nico got the inkling that she was trying to start a conversation and he was just not having that. Not right now. She sounded like she was going to make some more fun of him too and he’d had enough mocking to last him the rest of a semester already. 

He patted the pockets of his sweater and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. 

“I guess,” he said, fishing his lighter out of his jeans. “I’m going for a smoke, feel free to join me or not.”

She made a face. Clearly it was going to be or not. That was cool. He wanted to be alone for a bit anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A moment of silence for Nico getting an immediate crush on Will while everybody who read Burnt Plastic knows Will deadass forgot all about him. (I'm not sorry.)


	3. Nevermind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nico makes a few friends and more bad decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recognise that I have been gone for like two weeks but in my defence this chapter is almost 10k so.

If Nico thought that his arrival day had been bad, This only served to show him exactly how unprepared he had been for all the new and exciting horrors that university life had to offer him. 

And yet as ominous as that might sound, his first Monday as an officially enrolled student was fairly alright, despite waking up at six AM to Leo's blaring alarm clock and falling out of bed in his haste to scramble for his glasses. That hadn't been great. The worst part of it was probably the fact that Leo hadn't even moved. He merrily went on snoring like a chainsaw while Nico was now awake while he really shouldn't be. Also he spent ten minutes looking for his glasses and then another fifteen minutes trying to turn off Leo's needlessly complicated alarm clock. 

Fuck. 

By the time he'd regained full eyesight and woken up Leo by repeatedly hitting him in the face with a pillow, it was half an hour later and he figured he might as well head over to the cafeteria and get breakfast, even though his first class wouldn't be until eleven. He was awake now anyway and there was little chance he was going to go back to sleep with Leo scrambling around in a panic. 

So he brushed his hair, stabbed his left eye twice while trying to put his contact in, cursed for three minutes and headed down in his pyjamas which was admittedly not the smartest thing he'd done all week. 

Two steps into the hall, he already hated that he'd decided to do this. It was noisy. He was still tired because he'd only gone to sleep at two in the morning because Good Omens was really a good show and he had no self-control. And also he just then realised that he was wearing a ratty pink floyd tshirt and faded grey sweatpants that had probably one day been black because honestly all the clothes he bought were black. 

He felt a headache coming on. This feeling was strengthened by Bianca yelling his name and waving him over to the table where she was sitting with three girls he'd never seen before in his life and Reyna. 

But it wasn't like he had any other friends to sit with: even Leo had waved him off, muttering that he was going to cook up something for himself in the kitchen before running to class at eight in between yawns. Nico'd left him to his own devices because Nico didn't trust Leo Valdez anywhere flammable goods or devices. If the guy was going to set anything on fire this semester - which Nico didn't doubt would happen - he didn't want to be in the same building, thank you very much. 

So he dragged his sorry ass over to the table and slumped into the chair next to his sister.

"Hello brother," Bianca said. "Don't you look radiant today."

"Ti ficcherò gli stivali così in alto nel culo che assaggerai il cuoio," he grumbled. Which roughly translated to good morning, or something akin to that sentiment. 

She smiled and pointed at the counter where he could get his coffee without a word. He smiled at her ever so gratefully and went to fetch himself a mug before coming back with a greatly improved mood. 

He might be an addict but at least he admitted it. And coffee made him more bearable before two in the afternoon so nobody had ever brought up the courage to mention it to him. 

"So who are these beautiful people?" he asked, eyeing the three strangers warily. He cradled his mug in both hands like golem. The comment earned him an instant scowl from two out of three people at the table. That had to be some kind of record for him. Only six words in and they already disliked him. He wasn't even trying to be mean. Or condescending. Or any of that really. Maybe he still had his morning bitchface on. That would explain it. 

He looked at his sister and raised a brow. She just smiled ruefully and shook her head.

"He doesn't mean anything by that," Reyna clarified for some reason. "He'd just trying to be polite and generally bad at human interaction."

Nico, at that, did give them a reason to glower at him, namely that he scowled right back. 

"Yeah trust me, my brother isn't trying to make a pass at you, he's just dumb," Bianca added. She stabbed her fork down into her pancakes. He moved his glare from the strangers to his sister. 

Nevertheless, the comments seemed to have the intended effect because two pairs of tense shoulders relaxed. The black haired girl started to laugh. She looked oddly familiar for some reason. Especially her eyes. They reminded him a lot of someone else he knew. Somebody very annoying. 

"Oh this is grand," she said. 

Ah, then it hit him. Maybe it was the way she talked, but he knew at once who this girl was. 

"Oh hey, you're Jason's sister," he said. "Thalia."

Thalia nodded and pointed at the other two girls. 

"And these are Phoebe and Zoe, my sisters from alpha rho tau."

"Sorority girls," Nico said calmly. He still looked at Bianca, his questioning look intensified. "You're not thinking of joining a sorority, are you?"

Bianca pushed around a bite of pancake on her plate. 

"Oh you _are_ thinking of joining a sorority," he interpreted her silence. This was just great. "Dad's going to kill you." 

"I haven't made up my mind about anything," she bit back. Nico shrugged and held up his mug in a mocking toast.

"Here's to Hazel being the only di Angelo child to not disappoint her father," he snorted.

"So you told your dad, huh?" Reyna hummed thoughtfully. For somebody who claimed to be a morning person, she didn't look all that awake either. 

Nico quietly sipped his coffee for a while, thinking of how to put this. That might sound really quaint and sweet but really, internally he was having a full-blown gay panic. Reyna and Jason had been the biggest champions of him coming out to people. 

They'd nearly goaded him into telling his family. But then at the last moment he'd regained his senses and backed out because he didn't want to die. Like seriously, that was it, he liked being an accepted part of the family, even though everybody lowkey suspected he had some weirdness going on, that didn't mean he should suddenly start to cultivate their dislike now. It seemed to do well enough on its own. 

"Eh," he just said in an impressive show of calm self-control. "No, not quite."

Bianca looked up at him and frowned. "Told dad what?"

"Nothing important." 

Of course mentally he was scrambling to talk him out of the situation before it fully arose. Did he really just try very hard to hide his own sexuality from his sister? Yes. It appeared so. 

Was Reyna silently judging him with a kiwi in her hand? Obviously. He didn't blame her for that but his closeted ass wasn't going to get into that discussion in the middle of breakfast in a public cafeteria. "Anyway, the disappointment I was talking about was the tattoo."

Bianca frowned at him. She pursed her lips in a way that showed him exactly how sceptical she was that he was really not hiding anything of import from them right now. 

Maybe he'd overestimated how great it'd be to have Bianca around. Maybe he hadn't thought about how their friend groups would mix. Maybe he hadn't realised that she might find out things about him through the grapevine. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

He stared into his coffee for a few moments. His coffee usually managed to provide him with a lot of philosophical insights. The most prominent insight he came to at that particular moment in time, though, was that it was way too early for this shit. 

"I'll tell you some other time," he muttered and sipped his too hot drink to signify that this conversation was over. The strange thing was that he really meant it. Probably because he realised the alternative meant he was going to have to explain to her what happened in hindsight after she found out from somebody else and he wasn't looking forward to _that_ any more than one might to a dentist's appointment.

Bianca raised her brow at him. Nico half expected her to start arguing - a truly daunting prospect, especially in front of two girls he literally didn't know - but she just threw him a look that said _'you'd_ better _tell me later then, if you know what's good for you_ ' and let it go. 

For some reason that scared him more than if she would have argued for him to just spill the beans right then and there, but he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially not at six something AM.

Reyna rolled her eyes at him. At least she wasn't shaking her head. He wasn't sure how he would have dealt with her shaking her head. She was like a mother already, wielding guilt like a bona fide weapon. Nico felt bad for her future children.

"So," he cleared his throat. "Alpha rho tau. I thought you weren't a big fan of Greek life."

If her aggressive chewing was anything to go by, then Bianca clearly didn't want to be pressed further on the subject. 

"I said I was just thinking about it, didn't I?" she grumbled. Nico wisely decided not to press her on it. 

"Have you talked to Hazel?" he asked instead, changing the subject with remarkable stealth and grace, if he did say so himself. 

Things didn't improve from there, and he was almost happy when the girls announced that they had classes to get to or bookshops to scour, leaving him alone at the table. 

The first thing he did was slump over its sticky surface and groan. For once he wasn't self-conscious about the looks he was getting. Which really showed how great he was doing. 

* * *

For all his waking up at the asscrack of dawn, he still managed to make it to class with only a minute to spare. Though, in his defence, it was a miracle he hadn't missed his lecture entirely because he'd fallen straight back asleep after returning to his dorm and he'd conveniently forgotten to set an alarm. 

But making it to class on time led him straight into a new patch of fresh and exciting misery. 

Because, see, Nico hadn't accounted for his own utter social ineptitude when he'd decided to go to college in the first place. Now he was confronted with it in the worst possible way. 

See, here's something he hadn't considered before: lecture halls are huge compared to a classroom. The room he was standing in was about the size of a small movie theatre, shaped like a Greek amphitheatre and lined with chairs that had conveniently placed folding tables. 

He looked around, scanning for an empty seat at the back but obviously couldn't find any because any idiot knows that the back row is going to be occupied already if you show up late. For some god forsaken reason, it also looked like everybody had already formed little groups and staked out their territory. He was almost sad that he'd missed freshman introduction week for a split second, but then he remembered that the whole spirit of that would probably have been the same as Travis's stupid name games from yesterday which was enough to cure him of that folly. 

Still, it was daunting. He was surrounded by almost twohundred people, and he knew exactly none of them. 

Or well, almost none of them, it appeared, because right then a perfectly manicured hand waved at him from two rows down. 

"Italian boy!" Drew yelled at him. "Over here."

He quickly debated if it would be worth it to just turn around and pretend he hadn't heard her. But then again there was zero point in doing that because, honestly, in the end sitting with the weird girl from his floor was probably better than sitting by himself. So he squared his shoulders and skipped down the stairs. 

"Sit with me," Drew said. She moved over a seat so Nico didn't have to crawl over her and her bright orange skirt. "I can't sit alone."

"Ah yes," he replied before he made the stupid mistake of thinking about what his mouth was doing, because if Nico di Angelo was anything it was a sarcastic ass. "Can't have that, next thing you know people will think that you weren't prom queen."

"Excuse you, mister I'm dark and tortured because I carry a secret of impossible magnitude with me," she said. So she was indeed snippy, he filed that information away for any potential morning classes they might share. "But some of us actually like the concept of prom and popularity because it gave us the much-needed validation we were missing throughout our formative years."

"Honestly the black is just for aesthetic, Drew" he countered. "It looks great with my eyes."

He fluttered his eye lashes for effect. For one moment she glared at him but then a small smile broke out on her perfectly lined and glossed lips. Like, all shallowness aside, Nico was impressed by how put-together she looked. Putting on make-up like that was a skill that he sure as hell hadn't dipped his toes into, but she seemed to have it down to a T.

"I knew I was going to like you," she said. 

He pulled up one corned of his mouth into a lopsided smirk. "What makes you think I like you though?"

"Well the fact that you're sitting with me for one," she said. Nico had to admit that that was a pretty solid argument. That didn't mean he wasn't going to argue the validity of it though. 

"Well," he said, bending down to fish out his notepad and a pen. "It's day one and you're literally the only person I know in this whole room so it's not like that means a lot either."

"I recognise that point but for simplicty's sake I'm just going to ignore it," Drew said. "Because honestly, what are the odds that we'll eventually end up hating each other?"

She rummaged through her bag as well and came up with a pink notebook. Like hot pink. Whatever she said about validation, she had some self confidence that was admirable. Nico wouldn't be caught dead with a hot pink notebook and an orange skirt. He was all for disappearing into the shadows or being swallowed up by the earth. But here was drew who owned stuff specifically designed to alert people of her presence. Like, who does that? Who wears bright colours, it's like you're wearing a billboard that says _hello, I am here, feast your eyes, look at me!_ A truly horrifying thought. 

Nico might have said something like 'honestly, it's more likely than you think,' but just at that moment their professor walked in and started off a deep and interesting explanation of the structure of the syllabus that Nico decided he didn't need to write down because he would remember it. In a famous last words kind of way, obviously, this was his first day at college, there was absolutely no reason to believe that he wouldn't make that stupid mistake. 

* * *

The rest of the week was a dull montage of getting his syllabusses organised, having a ridiculous amount of coffee breaks with Drew, checking and double-checking reading lists to see which books were recommended and which ones were required so he knew where to write 'OPTIONAL' over their titles in the list. It filled him with such a sense of exilharation that it really should have given him some pause to think about how sad it was that not reading books was now a source of infinite joy. 

Also there were people there. Lots and lots of people. He didn't even know why this had appeared to be a good idea anymore, he had barely been able to stand the buzz of high school hallways and lecture halls were just infinitely worse. By the end of the week he was completely exhausted. 

But he was alive. He'd even managed to make a few tentative friends. There was obviously Drew Tanaka, who had by now decided that he was cool enough to be around and they were friends now. Nico hadn't gotten much of a say in that. He also made friends with a guy named Austin, with whom he shared algebra. He was a musical theory major and together they'd spent the two hours of their first lecture passing a notebook back and forth and making really silly drawings about how horribly they already couldn't follow.

"Dude, you can really draw well," he'd said at the end of class. Nico, being great at taking compliments, had ducked his head into the collar of his bonber jacket and muttered something about it just being practice, anybody could do it. 

"Nah, it's also talent," Austin had assured him with a clap on the shoulder that made Nico wince. "It's like saxophone. Sure, anybody can learn, but not everybody is going to get good at it, you know?"

"I guess."

They'd exchanged facebook information and that was that, Nico had made a second friend.

And that was it. Two friends. That was literally it. But he was proud of himself for even getting this far. He had somebody to talk to in all of his classes. He was one week in. He was not the brooding guy in the back who made edgelord comments on Byron. Nico figured that that was at least worthy of some kind of applause. 

What he was even more proud of was that he had managed to not kill Leo in the entire timespan of seven whole days. Not that he hadn't come close several times. Especially before noon. Especially on those days where Leo had to get up to go to class before him, which was most days really. 

The point was that he managed to restrain himself, alright, not that he hadn't wanted to kill him.

He told Hazel as much when he finally found his first moment to take a breather. It was Friday, and he'd finally managed to get some time to call her between assigned reading (after one class, it was horrible, zero stars for the academic experience so far) and scouring the campus bookshop for all the books that were actually required reading.

"Am I supposed to congratulate you for doing the bare minimum now?" Hazel asked, but she did so in the most loving way. 

"Hey, I made friends, you told me to go out and make friends in uni and I _did,_ " he grumbled. "I didn't promise that I would suddenly become mister popular who hangs out with random studygroups on Tuesday afternoons or knows everybody and their mother."

Hazel sighed. She shook her head, some unruly hairs springing up like antenae in a desperate attempt to escape her bun. 

"Nicky, at least pretend like you're trying," she muttered. "You hate being alone. It was awful when Jason left for uni last year you were moping all over the place. I don't even understand why you quit vollyeball as well. You had friends there."

"Yeah, Jason," he grumbled. After he had left the team had been a lot emptier and also a lot less welcoming. "And oh, hey, look, I really don't want to talk about this, so let's not."

"You were kind of good at it though," Hazel said softly. "Have you thought of joining any kind of club?" 

Nico sighed. It wasn't like he hadn't thought about it, but if he felt this exhausted after just one week of classes, he couldn't imagine piling on club activities. He wasn't the best with time management either. 

"Nah. I'm cool. I have people to hang out with. It's not like I spend all of my time holed up in my room crying over the amount of books I have to read."

His sister snorted. 

"Are you sure you don't want to consider anything? I'm pretty sure the drama club would be more than happy to have you."

"Rude," he said, but he was still smiling. "Who let my dyslexic ass study literature though? When was that a good idea?" 

"You have audio books though, right?" she asked, by which point Nico immediately regretted even bringing that particular vein of conversation up because now Hazel was bound to start mother henning him now. And he already had a mother for that. And a Jason. He was good in that department. "And Bi said she'd help you if things got too much."

Nico hummed. He rolled over onto his back, holding his phone up above his head in the perfect angle to fall on his face the second he lost his grip even a little bit. 

"I don't think Bi knew what she was talking about when she said she'd do that. My workload's a lot heavier than I imagined it could be. I doubt she can squeeze in summarising full-length novels."

Hazel made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat. She obviously didn't know what he was talking about, since she still had two years of high school ahead of her, but she was trying to empathise anyway.

"How is Bianca, anyway? I haven't been able to reach her all week," she said, as if that just occured to her.

Nico rolled his eyes. Right, Bianca. Bianca and her sudden interest to join Zoë Nightshade's infamous sorority.

"Haven't seen her since Monday, when she seemed pretty eager to join a cult."

Hazel looked at him for a long while, trying to decide if she should laugh or be concerned.

"The scariest thing about that is that I can't tell if you're kidding."

"I'm kidding," he assured her. Then honesty bade him to add: "Kinda."

"Are we talking the running naked under the moon and letting hair flow freely in the wind cult or the sacrificing goats to satanic powers cult?" she asked. "So I know what to tell Seph that I know nothing about."

"We're talking the sorority type of cult," he explained.

Hazel whistled and shook her head, making some more hair fall out of her scrunchy. "Dad's going to go ballistic."

Feeling his arms grow tired already, Nico curled onto his side, providing his sister with the worst possible angle of his face. He grunted. 

"Congradulations on officially being the favourite child," he said sarcastically. "Did he get over the tattoo yet?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "Actually, yeah, he only grumbles about it occasionally, so I think I still might have some competition for that top spot."

"Oh I still have a trump card that's going to bombard me to least favourite family member," he said darkly. 

They probably would have continued to argue about it for the next twenty minutes. He might even have told her what he was getting at exactly, when he said that, but the conversation was interrupted by the sound of frantic knocking on his door. 

His first thought was to ignore it. So he did. 

"Aren't you going to get that?" Hazel asked. 

He craned his neck at the door and shrugged. "It's probably just Leo who forgot his keys again."

Then the knocking didn't stop for a literal minute, which might not seem like a long time but it is when somebody's knocking on your door while you're trying to talk to your sister.

"You should probably get that," Hazel said. "I have to start getting ready anyway, I'm going riding tonight. Dad's taking me to the ranch."

"And you say you're not the favourite child," he clicked his tongue, but they both knew that it was all in jest. "Alright then, have fun."

"Don't kill Leo," were her parting words which was honestly fair. He was currently treading a very hazardous path by not stopping his contiuous assault on the door. 

When they'd finally said their goodbyes to each other the knocking had started to grate on his nerves so much that he threw his phone aside and marched over to the door, throwing it open and glaring at whoever was on the other side. 

It wasn't Leo.

"Oh my god _what_?" 

"Oh thank god I thought you were dead," Drew said. She didn't even ask if it was alright to come in but just strolled straight past him without missing a beat, Piper McLean hot on her heels. "Get dressed loser, we're going to a party."

"I'm not going to a party," he said. "And that's not how you quote mean girls."

"Isn't that Jason's old track team jersey?" Piper asked. 

Nico looked down at himsef. It was entirely possible that the sweater he was now wearing had once belonged to Jason, yes, since he had no memory of where it came from and he'd had the thing since middle school. (Wow, that was a depressing thought, he'd had the sweater since middle school and he still hadn't grown into it yet.)

"Perhaps," he admitted. "In all fairness the letters are so faded by now that I have no idea anymore."

Piper looked at him weirdly. Drew looked at him knowingly. He wanted to kick both of them out of the room but both girls looked like they could stand their ground and he would rather not start with a recorded warning within the first week of living in the dorms. And obviously there was the whole don't hit girls chivalry thing but to be honest he felt that if he was all for equality and women were looking for a fight then he had all the rights to hit back. 

"Doesn't matter because you're not going to wear it tonight, put on something at least half-decent," Drew said. 

Or commanded more like. 

"I don't think you understand," he said, slowly, like he was explaining something to a toddler. "I'm not going to a party." 

He may have crossed his arms defiantly and tilted his chin upwards as well. "I have a sweet date with social isolation and fomo planned for tonight and I really can't cancel again. Netflix would get very upset with me and we just got back together. I don't think I can handle another breakup after the week I've had."

Drew crossed her arms too and narrowed her eyes at him. 

"Oh you're not going to a party are you?" 

"Absolutely not."

She shared a look with Piper. 

* * *

Ten minutes later he was stuffed in the back of Jason's old Ford between the two girls. He'd found out seven seconds into their discussion about his outfit that these two girls needed to be seperated by a human barrier for everybody's safety. Strangely enough, though, they managed to agree on the fact that he should wear the tightest jeans he owned. Which he'd actually forgotten he owned and they were kind of too small so he could barely bend his knees without feeling like his entire blood circulation was cut off. Also there was the situation with his crown jewels that he wasn't digging but hey, there was no arguing with two fashion conscious girls that knew extensive amounts of combat techniques. (Don't ask how he found out about that one. Please.)

"I hate it here," he whined. Nobody paid him any attention which was probably for the best.

"Where are we actually going?" Leo asked. Which _did_ get a respone from Jason. Clearly Jason had his favourites too.

"The Artemis girls," he explained. "Reyna and Thalia invited us to their fall semester opening."

Which likely meant something to anybody sociable who was into sorority life, if Leo's excited "No way!" was anything to go by. Maybe Nico would agree with that sentiment, if he had any idea what Jason was on about.

"The Artemis girls?" he just asked like the plebe he was. "Like the Greek goddess?" 

"Like alpha rho tau," Piper explained. "A-R-T. Supposedly the sorority started out as a small group of girls who were tired of the constant mindless partying and whoring of the sororities they were in so they made a new one. Most of them were theatre students if I recall correctly."

"Doesn't really matter," Drew cut in. "The point is that it became the most academically inclined sorority on campus. They have a reputation of being cold as ice. Never date anybody. So there's this running gag that they're the followers of the Greek goddess Artemis who used to shoot men on sight."

Nico suddenly understood why those two girls had looked at him like he was an absolute barbarian at breakfast. Clearly flirting woudln't go down well. Not that it mattered to him anyway. 

"They take great pride in that reputation too," Jason said. He then diligently paused at a stop sign in the middle of an empty road. Nico felt like facepalming at his ridiculous correctness. Not that he would encourage Jason to start driving recklessly, he was the designated driver and Nico had pledged solemnly that if he was going to attend this atrocity of a social gathering then the first thing he planned on doing was getting smashed. "It's a fun joke, considering they're like a-r-t-emis. You know?"

Despite the horrible explanation, Nico kind of got what he meant. He heaved a sigh. 

"They throw the most wicked parties though and that's all that matters," Leo concluded. And honestly that could have been the whole explanation from the start but his companions seemed intent on making things harder than they needed to be. Exhibit A: he was stuck in jeans that were killing him. Exhibit B: whatever that just now was.

"Didn't know that going to university came with a whole lorebook," Nico said. "Do I get experience points for collecting codex entries?"

"Oh yes sweety," Drew said. She picked at some flaw invisible to the naked eye on her nailbed. "You get hella experience points and when you level up you get rewards. It's this thing called developing social skills."

Nico scrunched his nose. 

"I don't like this game."

"The rewards are real life friends by the way," she clarified, like that might have been lost in translation somewhere. 

"I get the metaphor _sweety_ ," he said. "I can even define the concept of a metaphor now."

"Spare me," she muttered, before they would both get into a whole conversation bemoaning the dullness of discourse analysis. It made him glad that he'd decided to major in literature and not applied linguistics like he'd originally intended. He'd really dodged a bullet there.

"I'm glad you decided to come along Nico," Jason said from behind the wheel when he'd decided that de road truly was as deserted as it seemed. Nico smiled like he had a massive tooth ache in case he was looking at the back seat through the rearview mirror. "It would have been sad to sit by yourself on the first Friday of the semester. We need to celebrate that you survived five whole days of classes already. This is an iconic moment."

He wanted to say that, really, he was good, they might as well just double back and drop him in front of the dorms again. He could celebrate perfectly fine with The Princess Diaries and a tub of Ben & Jerry's that had his name on it. (Like, literally, he'd put his name on it. Five times. He didn't trust his floormates enough to not go ahead and steal his ice cream if he didn't claim it hard enough. Such was the reality of shared freezers.)

And if anybody was going to be weird about The Princess Diaries then he would have them know that there was nothing wrong with a grown man watching them. He'd grown attached to them because Bianca always put them on during Christmas time in Italy, shhhhhhh. Sue him for wanting a comfort film right about now. 

But even _he_ , asshole di Angelo, couldn't bring himself to do that because Jason just looked so genuinely excited at the prospect of showing him to his first ever college party that crushing his hopes and dreams in favour of being antisocial seemed cruel. 

No, wait, he could, he was definitely capable of killing Jason Grace's vibe tonight. There was just no way that the women flanking him presently would let him get away with it. And he couldn't even run out at the nearest stop lights because he was stuck in the middle. Dammit. 

"Yeah, honestly I had no idea there was even going to be a party," he admitted. "So I was dragged here under threat of bodily harm." 

Okay so maybe that wasn't per say literally true but it also wasn't untrue either.

"Didn't you listen to me when I told you about this yesterday?" Drew asked. 

He tilted his head to the side and looked at her pensively for a moment.

"Was this during our Italian grammar class?" he asked, having a vague memory of her going on about a social event worthy of her attendance or something. 

"Yes," she snipped.

"In that case, no, I really wasn't listening," he said. He would have tacked on a 'sorry' but he wasn't really so that would just make him feel like he was being dishonest. And Jason always told him that being dishonest was a very bad idea if you wanted to make friends. Or keep friends. He wasn't sure, he usually didn't listen when he waxed all poetic about feelings and social skills and honour and sacrifice and whatnot. 

"Why do I even bother," Drew huffed. 

"To be honest I don't know Drew, because I've been trying really hard to deter you in your efforts."

"Would you two lovebirds cut it out?" Leo said.

Nico may or may not have relished just a little bit in the fact that everybody in the car started laughing simultaneously except for Leo. Nobody explained the joke to him either. 

In fact it improved his mood enough for him to stop complaining about being dragged to a party for at least long enough to get there. He did complain about the jeans though, he would forever complain about the jeans. They were ungodly and the first thing he would do when he got home was cut them up and throw them out. Nobody needed jeans this tight. Nobody. 

Nothing could have prepared him for the reality of a college party though. Mostly because he didn't even have to enter the house to know that it wasn't going to be like in the movies. 

What clued him in, you ask? Well, there might have been the girl crying on the front steps while her two friends talked to her in hushed tones and held a bucket under her face strategically. He felt like Hollywood had done him dirty, not portraying this marvellous part of the experience.

"What's up with her?" he whispered to Jason who shot her a quick look and shrugged. 

"Who knows?" he said. "Alcohol. Break up. Her bunny died? The stars are pretty from here?"

Nico needed a moment to process how flippantly Jason - _Jason_ of all people - had just answered that question. 

"What do you mean who knows?" he asked, looking over his shoulder as they passed by the trio. "Why don't you care more? Somebody is crying. Isn't this the point where you start fussing and asking everyone if they're alright?"

Jason smiled and patted him on the shoulder. "I'll fuss over you when you cry on the porch later tonight, don't worry."

"Why are you talking like this is _normal_?" he whispered in that way one casually does when they are horrified. The kind of _who are you and who ate my uptight friend_ whisper. You know the one. 

"Five bucks says di Angelo has a drunken breakdown in the garden," Leo cut into their lovely conversation. Nico wished he'd just go back to being afraid of him. At least that way he had some peace and quiet every once in a while.

"I raise you ten and say he spills a bunch of high school secrets while he does it," Piper hollered back. 

"Fifteen and I say he does it on the porch and his sister will be there," Drew chimed in joyfully. Drew didn't even know his sister. 

If anybody asked, Nico would tell them that the following moment was the one where Jason Grace was officially dead to him. Utterly and tragically deceased. Irrevocably lost, died on impact. 

"Amateurs," he said, the scar on his lip twitching as he tried to keep a straight face. "Twenty bucks says he has more than one and you're _all_ right."

Nico stared at them all for a moment. 

"I come out here, against my will," he said, shaking his head. "And then you can't even have some decency and be nice to me while I'm here?"

His friends - he supposed they were friends now, if they cut short a call with Hazel and commandeered his Netflix time now - just laughed at him and headed inside. 

* * *

He would love to tell afterwards that nobody won their silly bet and he was now what? Sixty bucks or something richer. The truth was of course much more entertaining. Or embarrassing, depending on your vantage point. 

Somehow he'd managed to get roped into a beer pong competition with Drew about two minutes into the party, which was a good first step to fulfill his solemn vow to not come out of this evening sober. Things went downhill from there. 

"This can't be normal beer," he said after round three. There were several things that made him come to that conclusion. He was way too unsteady on his feet, for one. There also wasn't any reason why the world was spinning so hard already. Or why his tongue felt so thick. Or why he wanted to curse so creatively at whoever had just turned up Pon de Replay because what was this? 2012?

"It's spiked with tequila!" one of the two guys on the other team said like it was the best news in the world. "You're going to get really wasted because you suck at this game!" he added, like it was even better news. 

Nico looked at the barely touched tirangle of red cups (at least the movies didn't exaggerate that) at the other end of the table and down at the decimated remains of their own on this side. 

"Suck it Mitch!" Drew yelled back. "I'm going to beat your ass back into next week!" 

Her ball bounced off the rim of a plastic cup pathetically and rolled back into Nico's hand.

Predictably, they did not, in fact beat Mitchell's ass back into next week. They got so messed up in the next twenty minutes that Nico had no idea if they were really twenty minutes or two hours or how it was already dark outside. All he knew was that he was sitting on the kitchen floor of the sorority house with clear shots in his hands and Drew didn't believe him. 

"Don't act like you've taken burning shots before," Drew said, pointing a finger at him. And of course, being the utterly sensible person he was, Nico decided to take this as a challenge. Because of course he would. He had roughly a litre of tequila spiked beer in his body right now. The chances that he was going to make stupid choices were climbing exponentially by the minute. "You're not even legal yet."

So of course he needed to prove her wrong because apparently that was the kind of person he was. 

"I did too," he said with a grin, whipping out his lighter. "And you're going to as well, princess."

"That's a fucking terrible idea," she said. 

They got a few looks from some people wandering into the kitchen but nobody disturbed them. Not even when Nico downed his shot and knocked two bottles of unknown content to the ground. Whoops.

"I was a terrible idea and still my parents had me," he countered. Because clearly that was the most appropriate thing to say in this situation. He scanned the selection of alcohol until he found a bottle of sambuca and grinned. 

"Okay so sweetheart," he said, pouring two shots and lighting them with the practiced ease of a part-time arsonist. "You don't actually _drink it_ while it's on fire."

Drew sidled up beside him and raised an eyebrow at the two lightly flickering glasses. 

"Then what's the whole point?"

He handed her her glass, which she took with two fingers like it was a loaded gun or like, a burning, highly flammable substance. Whatever seems more apt to describe the situation. 

"It looks cool." Duh. "Smother the fire with your hand, for like twenty seconds and then you breathe in the air underneath and take a shot," he explained. 

Which was perfectly fine, and perfectly safe. Unless you were Nico, you were drunk and you made the mistake of then clincking the two glasses together, splashing burning sambuca on both your own hand and the small rug you were standing on.

Do you know that thing you get when you've had too much alcohol and scary situations suddenly lose a whole lot of their gravity? Like you can bang your head on a table and get up grinning while your friends all look at you horrified, telling you that that was hard enough to get a concussion? 

Nico experienced one of those moments right then. Instead of freaking out like he probably should, he just stared from his hand to the floor and muttered "whoops."

Drew obviously provided the necessary freak out. 

"Oh my god I told you this was a fucking bad idea!" she shouted at him. 

"And I told you I was aware," he countered calmly. He put down his flaming bad idea in the sink and used the second basin to wash off the fire on his hand. Granted that was probably a dumb idea but he'd just set alcohol on fire so what was he going to say to defend himself, really. "Now take your shot while I stomp this fire out."

All in all it went surprisingly well. Drew extinguished her own fire and took her shot. Then she seemed to like it so much that she moved in on his in the sink and downed that as well. 

"Okay that was cool," she admitted. 

"Hey that was mine!"

Like the adult she was, Drew stuck out her tongue. 

Nico managed to get the rug extinguished too, without even needing to raise a panic of any kind. He was feeling really proud of himself. 

Of course that's when the universe was onto him and decided it was time for a firm dose of drama. 

"That rug is university property," somebody said from the doorway. 

It was the kind of person that nobody liked who had said that. Nico needed to take one look at him to know that he wanted to dunk this guy's head into a toilet somewhere to flush out the superiority complex radiating outwards from his every pore. 

He looked from the slightly charred corner of the rug to the guy. 

"I just gave it some extra charm," he explained. "It's got a history now. Add it to the lorebook."

Drew doubled over in laughter, freak-out immediately forgotten. Nico took it as a sign that she should stop taking any more shots because that joke wasn't funny at all. 

"What's your name?" the guy just asked. "I've seen you before, you live in the H block don't you?" 

"Nico di Angelo," he said, like the absolute dumbass he was. He even added an exaggerated curtsy. "That is the letter of my residence, good sir."

"You just earned yourself a write-up for destruction of school property," the guy replied with a grin of his own that reminded Nico oddly of a shark for some reason. 

"Dude," he said dumbly, trying to process how he'd just gotten in this mess. "Not cool. I'm not even in the dorm. It's not like your responsibility goes this far."

In fact he was pretty sure that nobody's RA responsibilities went as far as sorority parties in sorority houses, and he was pretty sure that giving somebody a write-up for drunkenly setting a rug on fire that was highly likely to not be school property at all was abuse of power and a gross misconduct. But that was something he only came up with the next morning by which time this jackass had already registered Nico's supposed mishap. Which sucked.

"I promise you I am well within my bounds," the guy said. He grinned, which made him look deranged. "And you're not getting away with this."

"Now listen here you-" Nico started but thankfully he was stopped in his tirade by Thalia Grace hitting the guy on the back of the head with a flannel on her way in. Though that this was actually a lucky thing, he would also only realise later on, when he found out who and what this guy was.

"Fuck out of my kitchen Octavian," Thalia said. By the way her words were slurred, one could assume that she was also rather drunk. "Nobody likes you and nobody invited you."

"Thalia Grace," Octavian - apparently - started to say but before he got any further Thalia whacked him again with her flannel. In the face this time. Nico decided that it was probably not a good idea to get on this woman's shit list. 

"Go suck the fun out of somewhere else," she said flippantly. "Or suck some blood or something, you vampire."

"We will talk about your misconduct at the Greek council meeting, Grace," Octavian growled. Then he turned around on his heel and marched out of the room with the flair of an absolute drama queen.

Thalia snorted at his retreating back. 

"Doubt it," she said. Then she turned to look at Nico and Drew and raised a brow. "What the fuck was he going on about anyway?"

Nico strategically put his sneaker over the black corner of the rug. 

"Spilled some burning sambuca," he just explained. As one does. "But it's out now. Nothing to worry about."

Thalia regarded him with an expression his drunken mind couldn't quite process. Maybe it was incredulousness. Or maybe she was just wholly unimpressed by the whole situation and slightly annoyed that he'd almost started a fire in her kitchen. Both seemed equally possible considering the circumstances. 

"Jason and Bianca told me you were a disaster but I had no idea it was this bad," she said, punctuated with an incredulous laugh. "Please tell me you didn't burn the rug. It's Zoë's and she'd be furious."

His eyes quickly flashing down to his sneakers and then back up at her probably gave him away. As did the way his voice was suddenly shrill and an octave higher than it usually was. 

"'Course not."

Thalia looked at him in the same way that Bianca always did when he was trying to hide something very obvious and monumentally stupid. 

"Okay, I singed it a bit," he admitted. 

"Get out of here before she walks in," Thalia just said. 

Nico dind't have to be told twice. He saluted, grabbed Drew by the wrist and dragged her back into the living room where the rest of the party was still in full swing. He was tempted to check his phone to see what time it was because he didn't have the faintest idea anymore at that point, but Leo waved the both of them over to the corner of the room where they were occupying a small circle of couches. 

He would love to say that everything that followed after that was fuzzy and riddled with holes. Unfortunately, he wasn't that drunk. He'd had enough to not care at all what the possible consequences of his actions might be. He hadn't had enough not to know exactly what those actions were.

So when Leo called him over from the ring of couches on the other end of the room and somehow roped him into a card game of questionable origin and quality, he didn't struggle nearly as much as he should have. 

"Brother dearest," Bianca said when he plopped down onto the couch beside her with a grumble. "You look like crap. How much did you have to drink? You know you're a horrible lightweight."

He shoved her in the shoulder. She laughed as she toppled over into Reyna, who pushed her back upright with an eyeroll. 

"And you look beautiful," he countered. "Like mom. I'm going to punch every guy who tries anything on you tonight."

"Wrong answer," she said with a scrunched up nose. "Very wrong answer on very many levels."

Nico just grinned at her and slung his arm over her shoulder.

"I don't even know if you mean that or not Nico," she said, trying to shove his arm off. 

"Funny thing, Hazel said the exact same thing when I told her you were going to join a cult today," he mused. Then he took the cup with Bianca scrawled on it from the coffee table, treating himself to a swig of... ugh. Diet coke. Just plain diet coke. He never liked the taste. 

"Fucking shit you're weird. How did you even get here?" Bianca said. She took back the cup when he handed it to her without a word. 

"Jason," he said. Bianca hummed and nodded because, right, that was usually how it went. Jason Grace decided that he needed to be more sociable and Nico was an absolute pushover for the guy. "Drew helped."

"Who the hell is Drew?" 

From his other side, Drew waved at her. "I'm Drew. Nice to meet you. Who are you exactly?"

Bianca looked... jubilant. Which Nico could kind of get. It was always nice when people didn't tell them how much they looked like identical copies of each other. For some reason it stung him right in his masculinity every damn time. 

"You mean you can't tell?" she asked prodding at Nico's nose. He swatted her hand away in annoyance. "But we look sooooo much alike."

"Ti strangolerò," he warned her. 

"Just look at those pretty doe eyes," she went on. 

"Ti strangolerò dolorosamente."

"Oh," Drew said. The sound of her pennies dropping. "You're the twin sister. I didn't know you go here too. You don't live in our building do you?" 

Bianca made a face, complete with sticking out her tongue and retching sounds. 

"Gods forbid," she said. "I spent eighteen years trying to get away from him, I wasn't going to request the same residence."

"Which is kind of rude, if you put it that way," he kindly informed her, like the good brother he was. 

"Me? Rude? I would never," Bianca gasped exaggeratedly. "That's your job."

"I'm not rude," he protested. 

"You can be very rude," Drew said. He couldn't believe his new friend was already ganging up on him with his sister. Maybe Hazel was right, maybe he needed better friends. 

"Stop siding with her," he told Drew, shoving her by the shoulder as well. "She's the charming one out of us. I need to be allowed to be jaded and bitter about being second best."

"Your attention please," Leo called everybody to order. 

"Lord help us all," Bianca whispered into her sensible, non-alcoholic drink. They shared a high five without even needing to look at each other. Leo gave them both the stink eye. 

"I liked it better when he was afraid of you," she told him at that.

"I know right?" 

Leo cleared his throat and decided to just ignore them and start his explanation. 

"Okay, so this Belgian dude at camp once taught me this, I think he called it ace of hearts," he told the assembled crowd of unwilling subjects. "The point of the game is pretty straightforward. You say something you will do if you pull the ace of hearts from the pile. Then you pull a card, and if it's the ace of hearts you actually have to do it. The catch is that each dare has to be worse than the one that came before."

"That sounds lame," Piper huffed. "So you basically just set yourself up to do something silly."

"Exactly," Leo grinned. "You make your own bed of doom and then you have to lie in it if fate decides it."

"So if I were to say I would shave off my eyebrows," Bianca asked. "And I pulled nine of spades, what would happen then?"

"Nothing," Leo said. 

Nico wasn't the only one who wasn't convinced, if the other people's faces were anything to go by. He was soon to be proven wrong. It was a lot more suspenseful than he would have given it credit for. It ended up being so much fun that they played several rounds. 

In them Piper ended up licking the floor. (Gross.) Leo had to turn off the music and yell "everybody wants a piece of Leo." (Less gross, and pretty funny in the end, especially since he went bright red), Drew had to give her phone to Bianca and let her text anybody in her contact list that they had very smelly feet (which she turned into an artful Shakespearean sonnet, if Nico did say so himself. He might have helped compose) and Jason, to his own horror, agreed to let Leo and Piper dye his hair some outrageous colour. He staunchly insisted that it needed to be washout hairdye, though, or otherwise he was going to come around and do horrible things to them in their sleep. Drew and Nico may have offered to help with those, as the great roommates they obviously were.

The fifth round was where the fun suddenly stopped and he was painfully confronted with what Leo had meant when he'd said "bed of doom."

That being said, he had no idea how things went so sharply downhill between him having to steal the frat next door's garden gnome and whatever the hell this was. 

In his defence, he could never have known that the neighbours had an even weirder bet running than the one they had going on at their own party.

What happened was this: they all piled outside, trying to stay as quiet as possible, which wasn't very quiet because most of them, Bianca and Jason aside, were absolutely wasted to the point of no return. There were also two parties going on, both of them blasting loud music and having people milling about outside and making such a ruckus it was half a miracle that nobody had called the cops on all of their asses yet. 

"What are you guys laughing about?" Thalia asked them. She seemed to have sobered up a little since throwing him out of the kitchen. Or maybe Nico was just that much drunker. 

In any case, he grinned at her and pointed at the bright green gnome on the frat house's porch. "I'm going to steal the garden gnome."

There probably should have been more of an explanation there but Thalia didn't ask. She just smirked at him and crossed her arms. 

"Are you sure of that?" she asked him. The assembled group was split between giggling and looking about as confused as Nico was feeling. 

"Yeah, of course, why wouldn't I be?"

Thalia laughed and then just pulled this all-knowing look. "No reason. You know we have a running gag about that garden gnome right?"

And that should have been Nico's moment to ask for more information about the whole thing but he was Nico and he didn't do things like thinking about the consequences of his actions. Or, well, he overthought them, usually. All the time. And then in a moment of clarity (which Bianca usually called utter stupidity) he set all of his anxiety aside every once in a while and did something really, monumentally stupid. This was one of those moments. He was also really damn tired of the whole lorebook and he didn't need the codex entry right now. 

"Okay," Thalia trilled. "Word of the wise, though, probably shouldn't let them catch you."

"I'm a really fast runner," he just said. "It's in the genes."

Which was a very creative way of putting 'I spent half of my life outrunning Bianca whenever I stole her Gameboy and she was in track and field so it was good practice.'

"Sure buddy," she told him and patted him on the shoulder. He frowned at her for a single moment, wondering why she made that sound so ominous. He didn't get the chance to ask though, because Leo and Jason pushed him onto the street and if he didn't want to be found out before he could even start his mission he needed to run up, grab the ugly thing and get out of there. 

So that's what he did. And he thought he'd gotten away with it too, until he heard the "hey!" behind him. 

The eight of September, 2017 was when Nico di Angelo found out that running in jeans two sizes too small was not something he could pull off. He'd only wished he hadn't found out about that by being tackled to the pavement by roughly a ton of muscle. 

"Fuck," he groaned. His knee was definitely scraped up. On the bright side, though, now there was a hole in the bane of his existence and he had enough of a reason to throw them out. "Dude, you're crushing me."

"Shouldn't have stolen the damn gnome then," said the ton of muscle that was apparently a guy. His voice sounded somewhat familiar but he couldn't really place it. Maybe that was because he was in a decent deal of pain as well. 

"It was a dare," he defended himself. "I didn't know shit, you're probably really hot and on any given day I'd sell my soul to be smothered by a cute guy but I'm pretty sure I cracked a rib and I can't breathe."

There was a moment of silence. The guy didn't move. 

"Are you flirting with me right now?" asked the guy. 

The correct answer would have been 'no'. Nico said "Maybe?"

He got laughter in response, which wasn't the worst that could have happened. 

"Hey, I'm not that ugly there's no reason to laugh," he grumbled, clumsily pushing himself up by his elbows in an effort to dislodge his captor.

"Connor leave the poor guy be," said another voice. He turned his head to the side to tell her that _thank you, yes, that would be great_ , but the words died in his throat when he saw who the voice belonged to. Because he'd seen that blonde hair and that exact camp hoodie taped to the inside of Percy's locker for years. 

"You're Annabeth Chase," he said. "Percy's girlfriend."

"Uh, yeah," she said. "Who are you?"

He recognised that starting to cry was probably not the nicest thing he could have done.


	4. Hello, I would like to unsubscribe from life.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nico makes more mistakes and possibly another friend.

"I'm never drinking again," he declared with a never before in his life displayed amount of spirit. No doubt he had even been utterly convinced of the fact at the time as well. 

"Sure you won't," Jason said, rubbing his back and probably wondering how they had ended up there. Or maybe that was just Nico, maybe Jason didn't really care at all, maybe he found all of this very amusing. Who knew? Not Nico, who was hugging a bucket to his chest and heaved into it every five minutes, just at the moment when he thought it was all over for sure now. 

"I'm serious this time," he whined, coughing in a lame attempt to get rid of the bitter aftertaste of vomit. "Like, one hundred percent serious. I am never drinking again."

"Look on the bright side," Leo said from where he was sprawled on his back. "If you puke out all the alcohol now, your hangover is probably going to be fine."

"I hate you."

Nico briefly deliberated if it would be worth it to throw the contents of the bucket over him but that was too gross even for him. The smell alone made him nauseous all over again. Unfortunately he didn't trust himself to not vomit all over himself, so he'd resigned himself to the sour, burning smell in favour of keeping his shoes. 

"And look on _my_ bright side, three people now owe me twenty bucks," Jason said, with unadulterated glee. Never mind that Nico wanted to die right then, be it of embarrassment or genuine physical misery he would leave in the middle for now. But here his best friend was, thinking only of his wallet. 

"I hate both of you," he said. (Leo would retell the story and say that he _whined_. Leo could shove a cactus up his ass.) "I feel ratchet. I want to go home."

Jason patted his back comfortingly, resuming the façade of a good friend, if only briefly. 

"Piper's fetching Drew, we can head once they're back," Jason explained. He said it like he'd been repeating that for a while, but in as far as Nico knew, this was the first time he'd truly registered the words coming out of his friend's mind. There were some gaps in his memory though. For instance, he did not know where the bucket came from and he also didn't know when or how he started to throw up. 

"Drew's not going to want to go home," Nico said. 

He came to that miserable conclusion all by himself. He felt like he deserved a cookie. 

Except, thankfully, he was proven wrong. And also not so thankfully, because the sight of Drew hiked up on Piper's back was rather concerning. 

"Is she dead?" 

There probably should have been a lot more emotion behind a question like that but he'd like to point out that he was preoccupied at the time.

He heard a small "fuck you," being muttered in a voice that definitely wasn't Piper's, though, which had relief washing through him. He was glad that she was still alive. It would have been awful to sit through all of his classes on his own for the rest of forever. Or however long it would take him to get his degree. He didn't trust himself to make another friend. 

"Just so you know, I'm never taking either of you to a party ever again," Piper growled. She unceremoniously dumped Drew on the porch where she sprawled out next to Leo. "You're a fucking nightmare. Both of you."

Nico wanted to make a smartass comment about how he hadn't asked to be there, but it was turned into a warbled mess when his stomach chose that exact moment to surprise him with another mouthful of bile. 

"What?" Piper asked.

He could just tell that her and Jason were sharing a parental friend look over his head, shaking their heads at each other in disappointment or something. Nico sniffed, tears apparently flowing again because hey, we were missing that. Now he had the whole set of drunken misery completed. What joy that brought him. 

"Never mind," he sobbed quietly. "Just, just let me go home. I want to vomit in my own toilet. I want to go home."

"You're a quivering pussy," mumbled Drew, looking mere seconds away from needing her own bucket. Nico found that offensive because...

"I don't even fucking _like_ pussy," he cried.

"Okay," Jason said. He gently grabbed him by the bicep and somehow managed to get him to his feet without losing grip of the bucket or spilling any of its contents. "Up you get. I'm going to drive you home now."

_Before you say anything you regret._

He didn't say that last bit, but it hung thick in the air between them. Nico was dimly aware that he should thank him for that later. He nodded like a little kid and followed him to the car on unsteady feet.

* * *

Somehow he got to his room, probably with Jason's help, because Jason was standing in front of him and helping him unzip his jacket. The bucket was nowhere to be found, but he also didn't feel the need to cough up his intestines anymore so he was actually pretty glad to see it and its contents gone. 

"I'm not a toddler Jace, I can do this," he complained, swatting the hands aside and fumbling down the zipper himself. Jason, like an absolute fucking mother hen didn't back off but decided he would just take off his shoes for him, then. 

He didn't have the energy left in him to complain so he just flung his jacket onto the floor next to him and watched as Jason fumbled with the knots of his laces. 

"Jason why are you my friend?" he suddenly asked, uttering a question that had been scratching at the back of his skull for a while now. Several years, really.

Jason paused. He took a very deep breath and wrangled his second foot free of evil, evil restricting leather. Nico wriggled his toes just to have something to do in the time Jason apparently needed to formulate a response. 

"Why do I need to have a reason to be your friend?" 

It took Nico a moment to fully process that and understand what it meant. 

"Everybody has a reason to do everything," he said. Infallible logic. "Like, I want to be your friend, because you're nice to me. And because you take me home from awful parties and take off my shoes."

He looked at the jacket on the floor and figured he should probably pick that up but his arms felt like they were made of jelly. Tomorrow. He'd do that tomorrow. He'd pick his jacket up and stop wondering why people would want to be his friend tomorrow. Hell, if he was feeling frisky he might even get his life together tomorrow. But not now. Always tomorrow. 

"Well, in that case," Jason said. He didn't sigh, he just took what he'd said in stride and rolled with it and that was so typically Jason and his stupid social skills. "I want to be your friend because you are a fucking riot to be around, Nico di Angelo. Because you're really kind and I feel honoured to be somebody you feel comfortable showing that to. Because sometimes you're really unlucky but you always find the best in everything and get through it and that takes balls. And because I can bring you to any fight and know you'll knock somebody unconscious for me and hide the body in a dumpster, no questions asked."

Nico felt his eyes well up with tears again. Fuck he needed to stop crying, this was wrecking his bad boy reputation. 

"Oh, there," Jason chuckled, sitting down on the bed next to him and pulling him against his body in a clumsy one-armed hug. "You're great, you know. Someday some guy is going to see that and sweep you off your feet."

"Why are you straight?" Nico hiccuped in response. He was getting snot on Jason's sweater but he really didn't care. It wasn't like he did his laundry so fuck it. "You're literally my perfect guy why are you straight?"

If it had been anybody else, Nico would have been extremely offended when the person he'd just admitted hypothetical attraction to started to laugh at him. Especially since he was like, crying right now. Jason was Jason though, and he somehow got away with pretty much every big no-no in the 'Handling Nico di Angelo' handbook.

"You are so wasted right now," he laughed, ruffling his hair. 

"I'm serious, that would have been the best moment for a love confession and we could have made out and, and-" 

Jason doubled over. 

"Nico your breath smells like death, you just vomited for like an hour. I wouldn't make out with you even if I _were_ into you," he choked out when he'd finally calmed down enough to speak. 

"I'd brush my teeth for you," Nico whispered seriously. 

"You should brush your teeth regardless of me, your teeth are going to erode otherwise," he said. "And then you should take your contacts out and those jeans off and go to sleep because you will be dead tomorrow if you don't."

"If you wanted to get me naked you should have just asked," Nico snorted. He sat up and wiped the snot from under his nose with the sleeve of his own sweater. That he would probably regret in the morning, it being part of the laundry that he _did_ do.

"You know Nico, the scariest thing about you making jokes like that is that I can never tell if you're serious or not," Jason sighed. Nico paused his clumsy efforts to undo the button of his jeans from hell to look back up at his friend and frown at him. 

"You don't seriously think I have feelings for you, right?" he asked, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of morbid hilarity. Because that'd take the cake, wouldn't it? Imagine he went from having an unattainable crush on the swim team captain to having an unattainable crush on his straight best friend. Sure, Nico's life was miserable, but at least he could revel in the fact that it wasn't _that_ miserable. 

"Hey, okay, wow, ouch," Jason placed a hand on his chest. "I would have you know that I'm a fucking delight to date."

Nico, despite everything, managed to wrangle his legs free of his now least favourite posession and trimphantly tossed it to the floor so he could ritually dispose of it later. 

"We're not having this conversation," he told Jason. "We are seriously not having this conversation and we _never_ will."

"You started it," Jason countered. For a sober person he was acting very drunk. 

They both jumped and nearly toppled to the floor when a third party entered the conversation out of nowhere. 

"And I'm ending it!" Leo cried. "Go the fuck to sleep."

"Fuck!" Nico yelled. Jason just laughed for a little while longer until Leo barked something about rigging both their beds to give them electroshocks throughout the night to periodically wake them up. Then he was up and out the door in no time but not before warning Nico that he really needed to take his contacts out and brush his teeth. 

Clearly he didn't do that, because that would have required him to get out of bed. So instead he just rolled himself into his blanket and conked out in zero point five seconds flat.

* * *

He regretted it the next day, of course, when he turned over in bed and felt like his eyes were glued shut and his mouth tasted like somebody had vomited in an ashtray. Which was kind of accurate, all things considered, but that didn't mean he wanted to think about that too deeply. 

The clock next to his bed told him that it was only ten thirty and he really hated his life. He'd slept for five hours at most and still he couldn't just roll over and go back to sleep. 

It didn't bar him from trying, but that went about as well as trying to have a conversation with a toddler who'd just thrown their sandwich at somebody. 

" _Do you think you could maybe get over yourself and have a healthy amount of sleep for one miserable day in my life_ ," Nico asked his body. 

" _Hmmmm,_ " it responded, giving him the most annoying itch behind his ear and the feeling that his left arm was so numb it was going to fall off. " _No_."

" _What if I promise I'll go to sleep at a decent hour today,_ " he tried, progressing to bargaining. 

" _Oh yeah, you might have a good night's sleep then_ ," said his body. 

Oh. Huh. Cool, that went a lot better than he would have thought. 

" _But not right now. Have a cramp in your calf while we're at it. Magnesium hoe, have you heard of it_?"

He groaned and clutched his leg and honestly, yeah, he felt for a brief second like he was going to die and it felt splendid in that awful way it does. 

"Motherfucker," he wheezed. But the battle was lost. He waited out the pain and rolled out of bed. Of course he had to get his foot stuck in his duvet and smacked shoulder first onto the hardwood floor. He was beginning to suspect that his life was a godly comedy show or something. 

" _Motherfucker_ ," he repeated, with feeling, clutching his shoulder and rolling himself up into a little ball on the floor. Leo mumbled something in his sleep that literally could have been anything, but Nico was going to interpret it as sadistic humour at his predicament. It seemed the most appropriate. 

As comfortable as the floor was, though, he couldn't stay there for long. He needed to pee like crazy and he was in dire need of coffee and a cigarette. He might as well also throw his contacts out. It probably wasn't a good plan to keep using them after yesterday. This morning? What did it matter, time was an illusion. 

So Nico peeled himself off the floor and swiped his glasses from the bedside table on his way out. He even had the good sense to put on a pair of sweatpants before he stumbled into the hallway and down to the bathrooms. 

Communal bathrooms at that, so some functioning idiot was bound to run into him at some point.

Now, say what you will about the horrors of shared bathrooms, Nico always found it nice to wake up and find somebody else doing their thing in front of the mirror. Which may seem like a paradoxical thing with his bordering on anxiety discomfort with other people, but he didn't think the two had anything to do with each other. It was his way of people watching. He'd always liked that. Nobody was out of their minds enough to start a conversation with a guy who was shaving at seven in the morning either, so he was spared the pain of social interaction so far. 

He just liked to see other people and their little routines and thought about how different his life might be if he did those little things differently too. Or some other little hypothetical things. He didn't know, it was strange, but he liked it. The kind of instant morning philosophical musing. Didn't take too much brain power to wonder about either. 

Today, though, he locked himself in a cubicle without even checking if there was anybody there and spent an ungodly amount of time trying to get back up again after he'd emptied his bladder. His leg was still a little cramped and also, he didn't want to get up. There was no point in being awake right now either because there was no way he was going to get any reading done with the severe sleep deprivation he'd been cultivating. 

This was a travesty. He couldn't believe his luck. (Bad luck by the way, definitely bad luck.)

But his desire for coffee eventually won out on his laziness, so he dragged himself back to his feet. He even took a small pause at the mirror to painstakingly fish his contact lenses out and replace them with his glasses which took about five times as long as usual. 

But he had to admit that all in all, things could have been worse. He didn't look that bad, honestly. His headache was also not as bad as he'd expected. It was more the "you've been awake for more than ten minutes, where is my caffeine intake," than the "why doth thou poison thyne own body with alcohol" type of headache. Small mercies. Maybe Leo had been right, maybe the vomiting had helped.

And his glasses did a great job at covering up how bloodshot and red-rimmed his eyes were. 

He was almost in a cautiously optimistic mood when he stumbled into the kitchen to finally, _finally_ get his coffee fix. Of course it was raining though. 

Under different circumstances he might have groaned loudly, stomped a foot or done something else to indicate his thorough mispleasure at this cosmic shitfuckery, but it seemed like he was starting to become desensitised to the whole thing. Was this adulthood? Was that what it felt like? 

There was no way he was going to stand outside in this weather though, there wasn't even a ledge to hide under and he really couldn't get away with smoking in the hallway. So instead of thinking about where he could tuck himself away in a corner outside, he made himself a pot of coffee (he was having a bad day, yes he knew this was likely to drive him up a wall somewhere) and opened the window. 

It had been a while since he'd snuck around like this, smoking out his bedroom window in a bid for his father to not find out about it. Not that his father didn't find out about it, this was probably stupid and he was likely to get himself into a busload of trouble, but he also didn't care right now. He had his coffee and his cigarette and he was just going to take a moment to tell the whole world to fuck off.

"You probably shouldn't do that," a gravelly voice said from behind him. Nico froze momentarily, because...

_"Are you flirting with me?"_

_"Maybe?"_

Oh god. He decided to play it cool and blow out a puff of smoke into the ongoing thunderstorm.

"Probably," he agreed. "But there are so many things I shouldn't do."

He turned around and watched for a moment how the guy looked for a mug that hadn't been used yet or at least had been cleaned properly after use in the cabinets and poured himself a mug of the coffee Nico'd just put on. 

"Like stealing garden gnomes?" he asked. The coffee seemed to have triggered a grin as a side effect, which would have had a lot more effect if he didn't have bags under his eyes for days. He looked about as hellish as Nico felt but in some wicked sense of irony or something he didn't seem to find that any reason to stop laughing. 

Nico could feel his ears starting to burn.

"Surprisingly that was one of my less shit ideas," he said. He took another drag from his cigarette. "There was a very short window in which I nearly hugged a cactus yesterday."

The guy snorted into his cup of coffee. He spluttered out a cackling laugh. "Why even?" 

He shrugged. "Who knows, Connor," he said then he paused. "Connor, right?"

"I'm surprised you remember that," said Connor and Nico agreed with the sentiment. 

"I like to remember the names of the people I try to disastrously flirt with," he said, mouth quirking up in an attempt at a smile. He needed more coffee and his mug was empty already. Fuck.

"So you can avoid them for the rest of your days?" 

Nico took one last drag of his cigarette and stubbed the end on the windowsill and flicked it out the window. There were a billion reasons why he shouldn't have done that, first and foremost that littering is really uncool and Jason was probably going to give him an earfull if he ever found out. But on the other hand he didn't trust himself to not start a fire in the kitchen waste basket, so throwing out one cigarette butt into the rain in favour of not setting a building on fire seemed like a good trade-off. 

"Of course not," he told Connor, sweeping the coffee pot from his hands. "So I can properly commemorate them in the book of mistakes I'm writing. It's going to be such a hit, just you wait."

He didn't have to wait that long, though, because at that moment he managed to add another mistake to add to the already quite lengthy volume. 

Pro tip kiddos: do not breathe out your last mouthfull of cigarette smoke next to a smoke alarm. He didn't think he needed to make a picture for that one. 

An ear-shattering beep tore through the air so suddenly that it had Nico dropping his mug and nearly - but only nearly, he took great pains to avoid throwing away something good - spilling the whole coffee pot all over himself. He did manage to get a healthy splash on his foot. Turns out it was still very warm coffee. 

"Could've told you that was going to happen," Connor told him calmly, while Nico put the coffe pot down and cradled his foot. 

"Honestly same," Nico muttered. He used the filthy rug to mop up most of his spill and when it didn't look like his foot was going to get third degree burns he stood up again and looked at the alarm. The angry red dot blinking along with the beeping was really aggravating. "That's just the kind of week I'm having apparently. Do you know how to turn this thing off?"

Connor looked at the blinking light with a pensive expression on his face. 

"Maybe?" he said. Then he laughed after realising what he'd said and winked at Nico with a grin. Nico flipped him off and told him to get on with it then, while he picked up the pieces of his broken mug. He hoped it didn't belong to anybody that cared about it, that would be a bummer. He'd feel guilty. 

Nico wondered briefly if he should have stopped Connor from climbing up on the counter and clicking the thing off of the wall but he didn't feel like arguing with somebody that looked like they knew what they were doing. And sure enough after a few seconds, the annoying noise cut out. 

He would have almost celebrated getting out of this scot free, but then of course his RA rounded the corner into the kitchen. 

"What the hell did I say about that smoke alarm," Tracis grouched. He didn't look much better than Connor.

"In my defence, I knew I was doing something stupid when I started it," Nico said. He threw the shards in the bin and turned to face Travis. He looked less than amused. The whole floor and all the people living on it were probably less than amused.

"He was smoking out the window," Connor translated and Nico narrowed his eyes at him.

"Way to sell me out, man."

Not like it wasn't fair, it just sucked royal ass. 

Travis sighed. He rubbed his forehead and made grabby hands at the coffee still sitting on the counter where Nico'd left it. 

"Nico, right?" he said. Upon closer inspection of the sizeable bags under his eyes, Nico concluded that yes, yes Travis Stoll had also been out yesterday night. He agreed with a short 'yep,' popping the p. "Look, Nico, I don't want to do this but I'm going to have to put that on record. Everybody sort of heard that just now, can't let it go unnoticed. So blah blah, strike one, I guess. Here's an official warning. Don't smoke through the kitchen window again."

"Got it," he sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses. "I'll behave from now on, can I go now?" 

The sudden onslaught of noise had really kicked his hangover headache into higher gear and truth be told he just wanted to get his coffee fix and play dead on the couches in the common room. Lucky for him Travis was a benevolent despot because he just waved him off and even let him take the coffee pot with him. 

Nico waved at Connor awkwardly, then wondered why he did that all the way to the common room at the end of the hall. Clearly he wasn't so good at the whole social interaction thing. 

The positive twist on the whole situation was that it turned out he wasn't the only one who had had the idea to take a public nap. 

"You have a problem," Drew greeted him. He'd ask her why she was already awake or why she was still wearing her pyjamas, but he _had_ just set off the smoke alarm all by himself and Nico didn't like asking stupid questions if he could help it.

She looked pointedly at the coffee pot in his hands. Nico wanted to tell her that at least he'd brought a mug to drink it in but that didn't seem to be the best way to dissuade her of the idea that he was a raging caffeine addict. Not that it wasn't true, but he didn't need more people to go around telling him he had a problem. He had Jason for that, and Jason had it handled. 

So instead he settled for telling her "You've known me for a week," and dropping down in the armchair next to hers.

Meanwhile, Piper looked up from where she'd buried her face in the couch and grunted briefly before resuming her attempts at hiding on the sofa across from him. 

"I've known you long enough to see that you have a problem," Drew just repeated. "Which is really concerning actually. Does nobody in your life mention the health benefits of not drinking your own sleep schedule to shit?"

Nico just snorted and poured himself another mug. Drew made grabby hands at it. He tutted. 

"No coffee for people who tell me I have problems."

"I didn't say you have problems, plural, but now that we're on the subject you have issues, want to talk about them? Piper's a psychology major."

"Pipe the fuck down, Drew," Piper said through a mouthful of pillow. Both him and Drew turned to her in surprise while Piper started on the arduous task of sitting upright. 

Nico had to give it to her, she looked worse than him and Drew combined. He wasn't sure how she'd managed to get herself in this state because for as far as he could remember she'd been a lot more sober than them when they left the party. He also wasn't sure how he had to feel about Jason's ex girlfriend sticking up for him. Honestly he still wasn't sure of Piper at all. She gave off very mixed messages. 

"What?" she asked, annoyed, as she noticed him staring. Drew snickered.

Nico decided he might as well come out and say it. The big thing that had been bothering him the whole week already. 

"You dated Jason in middle school right?" 

A pause followed that could only be described as awkward. Nico handed off his cup of coffee to Drew for a bit to just have something to do with his hands while Piper McLean stared him down. 

And here's a free bit of advice: if Piper McLean offers to stare you down for whatever reason, you decline. He squirmed in his seat. She brushed some hair off her forehead. She'd cut it since the last time he'd seen her, so now it was a choppy bob with a fringe that just fell into her eyes.

"I did," she eventually admitted. "What's it to you?"

That was a very valid question which he needed to stop and think about for a second. What was it to him, actually? Nico wasn't sure. He just knew that she still knew him from high school (because he was that one unfortunate kid that everybody knew by name. He was just that unpopular, he guessed) and he didn't quite know how to deal with that knowledge. Especially since she probably knew more about him than he knew about her. And that was the essence of his discomfort, wasn't it? 

He wanted to get out of his previous life, his old little circles of this and that over and over and over again. Of repressing himself so hard that he ended up sitting in a corner all by himself, wondering what he did wrong before people even came around to accuse him of anything. They'd come later though, the accusations. Better to anticipate them himself. They hurt less that way.

But here was Piper McLean, who had seen him do that to himself for years. Who had never talked to him about any of it. Who knew of him but didn't know him and still held such a delicate hand of power over his head like a sword hanging by a thread, ready to drop any second. 

Drew handed him his mug back and he didn't even know that his hand was shaking until he took a quiet sip. 

"Nothing," he finally said. "It's nothing to me, it's not even any of my business, but I was just-" 

He wanted to say curious but that wasn't quite right. He wasn't curious; he was anxious and out of his depth, those were two very seperate sentiments. 

"Yes, I used to date Jason Grace, it was in middle school, we broke up, he took it hard, now we're in college and I don't know, I guess we're friends again," she explained. Evidently she was too tired and annoyed to be having this conversation. "It's ancient history, Nico, I don't care what you think about me. I know you played volleyball with him and you were pretty chummy so I'm going to assume you know why we broke up, and if that's going to be a problem for your homophobic ass, then you can walk."

She even pointed at the door behind him and honestly if he hadn't been brain fried and hungover already that statement alone would have impacted his reaction time to a disproportionate degree. 

He needed a moment to drink his coffee, stare at her and come up with a response. 

The response in question was a very dumb "what?" that simultaneously conveyed his confusion at what she said and his wondering how his life had gone so sideways that he was being called homophobic by a girl that used to date his best friend while he was nursing a killer hangover. 

She frowned and sat forward on the couch. 

"You mean you _didn't_ know why we broke up?"

Nico shook his head helplessly. 

"Methinks you said something a little bit dumb, Piper dear," Drew drawled. She snatched the mug right back out of his hands again and cradled it like a gremlin. 

Piper buried her face in her hands and groaned for a while. Like a good while. Nico understood the sentiment but that was a lot of angry slash upset groaning for a public setting. Not that he was judging anybody for something as silly as that but... wow. 

"Fuck, okay," she said when she was finally done and rubbed her temples. "So."

Nico pried Drew's fingers off his mug and took it back gingerly. Piper fell silent.

"So?" he asked. He didn't want to push but he was also a nosy shit, so there was that. 

"Jason and I didn't work out because we don't have the same sexuality," she just settled for. 

"Oh." 

Nico nodded in understanding but simultaneously filed this instance away as something not to do when coming out to people himself. It was just... way too damn awkward. 

"Yeah," Piper mumbled.

"Oh, okay, cool, you don't like dick," he went on. She started to glare. He took another sip of his coffee and used his foot to keep Drew and her sticky fingers at bay. 

"Di Angelo, I swear to god if you-"

"No seriously," he said. "Cool. Leaves more men for the rest of us."

Drew tickled the bottom of his foot which caused him to spill coffee onto the couch. He lost possession of the mug for that and he was pretty sure this time it was permanent. Dang it.

"Not that that's going to help your awkward ass," Drew muttered over her stolen bean juice. Would it be too petty to start drinking straight from the coffee pot? He considered it, but then he remembered all the dirty finger marks that marred it on the outside. Probably not a great idea. "Have you talked to mister doctor at all since Sunday?"

Like a mature adult, Nico kicked her in the arm. Predictably she didn't spill because she was Drew Tanaka and things just seemed to go her way most of the time. Bloody lucky people in life. Ugh. 

"He's not a doctor yet," he said. In hindsight, yes, he realised that that was not the best defence he could have thought up but by now we've already established that his brain wasn't working the way it was supposed to. And if it was working properly he wasn't a very smart man.

"And you're smitten," Drew said. "Just admit it. You're smitten."

"I am not smitten, you absolute heathen!"

Like a little shit, Drew looked at the door, sat up and dramatically gasped. "Oh my god I'm so sorry Nico," she muttered. 

Like an idiot Nico nearly broke his neck to turn in the direction she was looking and realised his mistake. Too late of course, because Drew was already cackling and kicking her feet into the air. 

"You are _so_ smitten," she repeated her earlier statement. Nico seriously considered going back to bed just to hide under the covers. "Hey Pipes, Nico has a crush on Will from number seven."

Nico's hands grabbed onto he nearest pillow within reach and smacked her upside the head a couple of times. He was getting good at that, what with getting Leo out of bed that way for three days in a row. 

"You're a horrible person," Piper said, but there was a smile playing at her mouth that made Nico drop his pillow and steal back the coffee mug. He didn't agree with that statement, strangely. 

He smiled at her. She stuck out her tongue. Yeah. Drew was great. 

"So anyway," he said, clearing his throat. There really wasn't anything else that needed to be said on the subject. Both him and Piper had understood perfectly, and they all knew that it wouldn't leave this room. "Jason's hair. What colour did he say he was going to dye it?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, so, this took a bit longer than usual, and also, I have the unfortunate news that the next chapter will also be delayed because uni is a thing, still. 
> 
> If you want to hang out with me in the meantime, though, feel free to hit me up on tumblr @counting-yellow-cars  
> (And follow @alltheglowing eyes there as well! They are a riot. 10/10 recommend a follow!)
> 
> That just leaves me to thank all of you for your comments and kudos! They are so much more than I could have hoped for. If I don't get around to updating before the hollidays, I already wish each and every one of you a very happy christmas and a wonderful new year. May 2021 suck less than the cursed year of our lord 2020.


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